418. End Of Watch (2012)

Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Peña, Anna Kendrick

Director: David Ayer

Running Time: 109 mins

End Of Watch is an American film that follows the lives of two LAPD police officers, partners in crime, and the events they experience while on the beat in a city filled with crime and danger.

I’ll start by quickly talking about the style this film is made in. Basically, it’s like watching a police-chase-crash-death show on Pick TV, filmed in the style of a documentary, with shaky cams, a bit of breaking the fourth wall, but a lot of realism.

That’s what I thought was good about this, because it really makes you get in touch with the characters and the experiences they are having, showing a gritty realism that is fascinating to watch. The only downside to this is that it is a little bit distracting to watch, and I was often being pedantic about how the filming wouldn’t have worked in the situation or whatever, so that was a little annoying, but on the whole, it was an interesting and seemingly original way of representing a fictional story.

In terms of the story itself, I did quite enjoy it. There were numerous points of great action and great peril, as well as some extremely gruesome scenes that grabbed my attention easily. The only times when I wasn’t too fascinated were the in-between periods, which I found to occasionally be a little boring and irrelevant to the story.

It’s not until the end of the film that I really managed to appreciate these more personal sequences, because they do give you an emotional connection to the characters, which is needed by the action-packed climax: feeling tense and scared as to whether they would die or not in this battle.

Overall, I’ll give this a 7.5, because it was an exciting story, told quite well through an interesting medium, despite often being either boring or annoying to watch.