END OF WATCH: Foundering Footage

Crimefighting is delightful.

Director: David Ayer
Writer: David Ayer
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Peña, Anna Kendrick
Runtime: 109 mins.
2012

I want to talk about found footage.  Let's talk about this movie more generally first.

End of Watch is a boots-to-the-pavement police thriller that follows the everyday lives of two patrolmen, partners Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Peña).  They aren't corrupt, and they aren't saints.  They're just a couple of good dudes.  The film is rather plotless, or at least the plot operates covertly.  These characters eventually get bound up in Mexican drug ring shenanigans, which is the sort of thing that tends to turn out poorly for everybody involved.  But for most of the film, this pair is just cruising about their day, and we feel like we're along for the ride.

I never left my state of pleased complacency while viewing the film, and that is owing almost entirely to Gyllenhaal and Peña's performances.  They're proto-bros, broing it up for the brotality of this movie's bruntime.  Seriously though, they're great together.  Their chemistry is the driving force of this movie.  It breathes life into every scene and makes their story a thing worth watching, even when you feel like the movie isn't going much of anywhere.  Such organic performances are rare in buddy films.

A lot of the trappings around this relationship are kind of a mess, though.  The plotlessness is fine, but the ancillary characters feel forced.  Taylor's love life is thrust upon us as a rather uninventive way to drive home that these cops have something to fight for.  Anna Kendrick doesn't have a whole lot to do as Taylor's girlfriend other than smile a lot and try to seem like a fun person.  Zavala's wife doesn't fare any better.

Worse than them are the artless, arcless "villains", the representatives of the aforementioned drug ring.  We are given several sequences from their perspective for no discernible reason other than to remind us that they do exist, and they are mean.  Their collective characterization begins and ends with, "Gee, today seems like a good day to go out and shoot some bitches."  The sequences are supposed to feel gritty, but instead feel itty-bitty.

Which brings us to another attempt at grittiness: the found footage premise.

What you gonna do when they come for you?

Apparently Taylor is taking a film class (which never figures into the plot or his characterization in any meaningful way), for which he has decided to make a movie about the police force (read: himself).  This means several scenes are spent establishing this premise, and explaining why he is carrying a camera around all the time, and also explaining why the cinematography for this film is so fugly.  Except it's not a proper explanation, because like half of the film's shots could not possibly come from any of the camera apparatuses the characters are wielding.  So the premise just pops up every so often when a superior officer tells Taylor to put his goddamn camera away, like a gnat hellbent on not letting you forget about it.

The premise drops off the radar after a while.  It feels like the filmmakers want us to glaze over it, so we don't question who is recording each and every shot.  I understand that it's supposed to make us feel closer to the protagonists, like we're getting down and dirty with them in the streets of L.A., but it ends up feeling more like a cheap excuse to be haphazard with the mise en scene.

Thinking about the failures of found footage in End of Watch led me to ruminate about when the technique is effective.  People always rag on the subgenre because of the way it abandons traditional scene composition technique.  But there is something intriguing about the premise that makes me wish it would succeed.  Off the top of my head, the found footage films I've seen are: The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, V/H/S, and Chronicle.  None of them really did it for me, except Chronicle.  Chronicle blew me away.

Chronicle deserves a post of its own, but after thinking about its found footage aspect, I have a feeling that the premise only really works if you treat the camera as another character.  That sounds pretty abstract, but hear me out.  An important part of Chronicle was the way the main character used his video camera to mediate his relationship to the world, and how the lens both documented and distanced a chaotic social reality that was perplexing to him.  He interacted with the camera, spoke to it like you would your closest friend.  He treated that camera like a cherished stuffed animal.  And his relationship with the camera grew and changed along with the narrative.

None of this was true for End of Watch.  The camera is nothing more than a device, a nuisance.  The characters have no relationship to it other than momentary distraction.  So it falls flat and ends up feeling more lazy than compelling.

Maybe part of the reason the camera needs to feel like a character is because with found footage, unlike most films, you're bringing the camera into the world of the film.  It becomes an object that characters must interact with at all times.  Therefore it needs to feel dynamic rather than a given.  After all, by hewing to found footage you're essentially crippling the visual possibilities of your movie in order to achieve some particular commentary or perspective.  When End of Watch loses the found footage premise in the shuffle, it loses what chance it had at any commentary it could have made via the method.  A bad character is one who drops out of a movie partway through without impacting the narrative or coming to any satisfactory conclusion.

Good thing Gyllenhaal and Peña are so fun to watch.

2 / 5  BLOBS