Review: End of Watch (15)

Jake Gyllenhaal in cop movie End of Watch

By Tony Earnshaw
Published on 23/11/2012 10:43

Hand-held point-of-view cameras capture the mundanity of daily life for two young cops in Los Angeles where even the most seemingly innocuous call can lead to a house of horror.

Brian Taylor and Mike Zavala (Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña) break the routine by filming one another – and the people they happen across – as they tour their beat.

There’s a fire and a rescue of children. They find noisy kids gaffer-taped in a closet. A house full of emaciated people. A cellar full of death. And in amongst all of this madness Taylor and Zavala draw the murderous attention of a drugs cartel. “You just tugged on the tail of a snake,” warns a special agent. From then on life becomes a lot more complicated.

A buddy movie in which the Riggs/Murtaugh double-act is replaced by hard-nosed policing and a stark reality check, End of Watch is at times a remarkable portrait of comradeship. Gyllenhaal and Peña enjoy a genuine chemistry as they tour the mean streets of the City of Angels. It might resemble a video game but this is deadly stuff. No superheroes here.

Writer/director David Ayer has enjoyed a respectable track record as the creator of a string of intelligent cop-orientated movies that have included Training Day, Dark Blue, Street Kings and Harsh Times. End of Watch is the latest in this series and it shows the evolution of his theme. It enjoys a plausibility that so many other over-cooked, high-octane, loud and flashy flicks fail to deliver.

Lifestyle

The Arts

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Review: End of Watch (15)

Top stories

Lifestyle

The Arts