Training Day

Continuing my series of examing movies that have been out for a while, we look at "Training Day".

This movie is awesome. Denzel is a great actor, but he's almost always in a role where he's the typical good guy. In this film, he is most assuredly not the typical good guy.

He plays an undercover cop that has to take a promising young police officer (Ethan Hawke) around the block a few times to see if he can cut the mustard as a narc. Denzel spends the whole day messing with Hawke's head and driving him around some of the scarier parts of town, trying to see if he has what it takes to deal with the drug dealers and users of the world. His tactics are unethical. His language is crude. He is a bully. And, he has a pimptastic ride.

In short, he's awesome.

Ethan Hawke's character struggles with the reality that being a narc means having intimate knowledge of drugs and perhaps bending the rules of good police officering every now and then. But, in the best scene in the movie, the situation Hawke struggles with most will have you leaning forward on your couch and hoping like hell he can extricate himself from one of the scariest and most tense couple of minutes of cinematic history.

If you watch this movie and don't think it's one of the best you've ever seen I'll come to your house and give you ten dollars.