Training Day review – Denzel Washington’s finest, most sinister hour

This LA crime thriller from 2001, written by David Ayer and directed by Antoine Fuqua and with cameos from Eva Mendes, Macy Gray, Snoop Dogg and Terry Crews, is as superbly watchable as ever; it is as instantly and horribly addictive as the PCP that Denzel Washington’s imperiously corrupt cop makes his rookie underling Ethan Hawke smoke on the job as a grisly initiation ceremony. A true narcotics cop is a drug connoisseur, he tells him with a grin, all part of imposing your personality on the streets.

When I saw this on first release I think was wary of a certain self-consciousness in Washington’s Oscar-winning performance as an LAPD officer radioactive with his own psychopathic corruption and conceit. I also ungenerously found fault with a certain final coincidence. In fact, the self-awareness of Washington’s performance – as crafted and mannered as Olivier playing Mr Puff at the Old Vic – is a part of how mesmeric it is, and that final heartstopping twist is a glorious showstopper from Ayer, the screenwriter whose masterpiece this film is. Around the same time, Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary had been finding a kind of breezy, intoxicating irony and cynicism in violence; Michael Mann revelled in the military discipline and organisation of cops and criminals; Abel Ferrara located a desperate vision of evil in his Bad Lieutenant smoking the crack he had confiscated. But Ayer and Fuqua were doing something more old-fashioned, more rooted in a (distant) belief in due process and crime not paying.

Hawke plays fresh-faced rookie cop Jake Hoyt, with a wife and baby daughter, excited about a possible promotion to the LAPD undercover narcotics division; to prove himself, he must ride along for a “training day” with the charismatic but sinister veteran officer Detective Alonzo Harris, unforgettably played by Washington. Alonzo is going to teach Hoyt that to keep order you can’t be too fastidious about the rules: you’ve got to be breezily, insolently cool to over-awe criminals with your confident authority, and you’ve got to know how to take and receive a cash bribe and be unafraid of violence.

Alonzo’s mission on this training day is to get Hoyt’s “cherry popped” – in effect, to get him used to the corruption and to get Jake irreversibly smeared with some corruption of his own so that he will not be tempted to be a boy scout and inform on his fellow LAPD officers. But more than this, Alonzo is worried about a debt to certain Russian businessman he has incurred on a recent visit to Las Vegas. Could it be that everything that is happening to poor, innocent Jake has something to do with that obligation?

Training Day is most enjoyable in the outrageous way that Alonzo drives around town, greeting his various contacts, allies and glowering informants and treating us to the classic Washington swagger as he gets in and out of his car. You can see Washington’s Alonzo as politician and leader, with resemblances to his Malcolm X and Macbeth, though it’s fair to say Washington has never quite topped this performance. It’s an unparalleled treat to watch him messing with the bewildered Hoyt at their first meeting at a diner, and then to watch the two men striding out to the car, filmed from a low camera angle. It is all thrillingly ominous.