End of Watch Review

David Ayer's conceit is that everyone is filming: Brian Taylor for an elective class, his partner on a clip camera, the gang members on their own phones, the wall units in the station. The conceit leaks badly. Whole scenes come from angles no character could be holding, and once the film starts cheating its own rule you spend the next hour waiting for the next cheat. What holds is the patrol car. Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena talk for two hours about marriage, about whether a fight is worth having, about nothing much at all, and the talk is specific enough that it reads as friendship rather than as writing.

The house fire is staged in real smoke and real dark. The raid on the stash house, where they find people bound in a back room, has a dread the plot around it never earns. That plot is the weak part: the cartel exists to menace and to close a trap, the escalation from patrol work to a contract arrives exactly on schedule, and Anna Kendrick and Natalie Martinez are handed warmth and almost nothing else. Then the last alley comes, and what Pena does in it lands very hard.