Stoutor
It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.
Siflutter
It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.
Billy Ollie
Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable
areatw
Shot documentary style, 'End of Watch' is a fascinating and insightful police drama. The film benefits from two brilliant lead performances from Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña, who bring energy and personality to their roles as officers Taylor & Zavala. 'What the film lacks in term of plot development it more than makes up for in entertainment value, with some intense action scenes, genuinely funny moments and a great script.Part of the reason the ending is so hard-hitting is because it's easy for the audience to build a connection with the two officers. They are both realistic and relatable characters and, by the time the end of the film comes about, it feels like you know them personally. 'End of Watch' is a great film, both an intense action drama and a realistic and fascinating insight into daily life of a police officer.
seymourblack-1
Instead of relying on an orthodox plot-driven piece to illustrate just how challenging it is to police South Central Los Angeles, this crime drama focuses on the work of a couple of young, honest LAPD officers who're routinely thrown into situations that are extremely dangerous, unpredictable and potentially life-threatening. The cops in question are Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Miguel "Mike" Zavala (Michael Pena) who firmly believe that they "get involved in more capers in one deployment period than most cops see in their entire careers".In their work, the threat of violence is ever-present with even the most routine-sounding call-outs (e.g. a noise complaint or a missing person report) providing no room for complacency and events like a car chase almost inevitably ending in a shootout. Another type of danger they encounter is seen when they arrive at the scene of a well advanced house fire with no fire fighters in attendance and kids trapped inside the building. The extreme bravery that they display in going into the house and successfully rescuing the children is then fully recognised when they're both awarded the prestigious "Medal of Valor". Not all their endeavours, however, lead to such positive outcomes and when they unwittingly start to disrupt the activities of a ruthless Mexican drug cartel who are in the process of spreading their influence into South Central; contract killers are quickly hired to eliminate them.Taylor and Zavala's professional partnership and personal friendship were both well established long before they're first seen on-screen and their interactions clearly display how unshakably loyal they are to each other and how readily they would trust each other with their lives. As well as sharing a great deal of banter, they also discuss their personal lives and challenge each other's views on how they conduct their relationships. Taylor who's had a large number of short-term relationships has recently met Janet (Anna Kendrick) and Zavala is happily married to Gabby (Natalie Martinez) who's pregnant with their first child.Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena are both outstanding in their roles which provide a marvellous insight into the type of people who put their lives on the line every time they go out to work. Whilst the dangers they confront provide the movie with most of its tension, there are also many lighter moments which show another side of their personalities and Brian and Janet's moves when they dance along to "Push It" by Salt 'N' Pepa are a lot of fun to watch. Taylor delivers the movie's opening narration which includes the line " behind my badge is a heart like yours" and Gyllenhaal and Pena's performances leave no doubt that this is indeed true of the courageous tough guys that they play."End of Watch" is gritty, action-packed and presented in documentary-style with the events on-screen being seen from multiple viewpoints by courtesy of a whole variety of different cameras (e.g. a police dash cam, a camcorder carried by Taylor and cameras attached to the cops' uniforms ). This treatment is highly effective in enhancing the immediacy, edginess and excitement of what's seen during the episodic accounts of the cops' activities and the movie's excellent soundtrack also complements its style perfectly with Public Enemy's "Harder Than You Think" providing a real high point. Most people will be pleasantly surprised to find how engaged they become with Taylor and Zavala as characters and how much more substance, poignancy and humanity is seen here, compared to most cop movies.
dromasca
The fact that David Ayer is both the sole author of the script and the director of 'End of Watch' is quite interesting. If two different individuals would have written the script and directed the movie, respectively, I could have commented that the thin story written by the script writer had to be balanced by the film director, and he picked an interesting manner of filming based on some not very solid pretext in order to achieve what is an interesting movie. As the two are one - David Ayer - I am guessing that the idea about how to make this movie came first and the story was built around it. Of course, this is just a guess.Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Peña) and a couple of patrolling cops in the violent low-class districts of LA. One is a WASP, the other is Mexican. They are exemplary cops, actually too good to be true, the kind of cops that save kids from burning houses at the risk of their lives and get decorated for their deeds. They are more than friends, they are brothers, share all secrets, dance at each other's weddings and hold new born kids. They live and fight crime together and are ready to die together. And death eventually comes after them. Violent and unfair as they live in a violent and unfair world. Ours.All this is nice, but, frankly speaking, it does not make for a too interesting story. Actually what really happens on screen is not too much and it's also very predictable. I could put a rather safe bet that at the end one of the cops dies, the other survives to see his funeral, the only question is which fate each of the two will be to occur. There is actually so little action in the film that the script-writer / director added a few minutes at the end describing facts having happened previous to the ending that do not add anything to the story.With no real action to put on screen David Ayer tries to catch our attention with describing the details of the relationship between the two cops and with their colleagues, in the style made famous by 'The Wire' TV series. I like this part, which was supported by the excellent acting of Jake Gyllenhaal (one of my preferred actors) and Michael Peña . The second film directing trick is to use hand-held camera for part of the time. The pretext is the passion of one of the cops for documenting his work, which is mirrored by a similar hobby of one of the gangsters. It is this kind of technology-based detail which became obsolete one or two years after the time the film was made (2012) when any smartphone became a hand-held video camera with social networking becoming a repository and mean of communicating and transferring video files. We are left with an experiment which does not harm too much and makes the viewing of the film more interesting.At the end, I feel like 'End of Watch' despite its qualities risks to disappoint the two categories of viewers that it seems to target. Action movies fans will be disappointed by the too short and too simple cop story. Quality cop dramas fans will be disappointed because the heroes do not enjoy enough time on screen to develop their friendship and make a difference in the violent world that they deal with on daily basis. Both claims could have been solved by a more complex and interesting story and script, but 'End of Watch' did not have one.
TomMK22
David Ayer's thrill-a-minute, non-stop actioner is a telling and down-to-earth story of two LAPD officers and partners, patrolling the streets and fighting crime. Ayer uses just enough shaky-cam to ensure the audience believes in their protagonists, played with a great amount of charisma and believable brotherly affection by Jake Gyllenaal and Michael Peña, and to create a real sense of inevitable and unpredictable violence around every street corner. The film's unwielding use of brutal violence and gore at key moments - including a police officer with a knife stuck in his eye and mutilated bodies found in an abandoned house - mixed with the cheery and fraternal atmosphere between the partners creates a distinctly strange and unpredictable vibe to this brilliant film.
