TRAINING DAY

After this first day on the job, things can only get easier for rookie LAPD narcotics officer Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke). His new boss, Detective Sergeant Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington), has gotten him stoned, drunk, and wasted on PCP and it’s not even noon. He and Antoine Fuqua’s initially brilliant, ultimately fizzled second feature have gotten so high so fast that the only direction is down. For almost an hour, Day looks as if it might be the savviest, most eye-popping inner-city crime thriller since The French Connection and maybe the first commercial film in ages to deal with race, politics, and power honestly.

And it succeeds as long as Washington’s characterization of Harris maintains its integrity and ambiguity. Freed from the burden of being the next Sidney Poitier, Washington puts in one of his best performances as the enigmatic and irresistible Harris, the Dirty Harry of the New Millennium. He’s the black man as übermensch, a gangsta guru with a badge, leading the initiate Hoyt into the anarchy and madness that pass for law and order and with nihilist glee implicating the would-be innocent in a vision of thorough corruption. It’s a giddy trip, but true to the genre, the bad guy has to be taken down and goodness restored with turgid predictability and no truths taken seriously. Training Day is a squandered opportunity, but maybe Fuqua has learned some lessons from it; he’s a talent to watch.

— Peter Keough