Harsh Times Review

David Ayer wrote Training Day and then directed this, and the resemblance is close enough to hurt. Jim Davis is a Gulf War veteran drifting around South Central with his friend Mike, drinking, shooting at things, waiting on a Homeland Security job, and for about forty minutes the aimlessness carries a documentary charge. Christian Bale is good, working a flat Southern California accent and a grin that arrives half a second before the violence. Freddy Rodriguez plays the friend as a man who keeps choosing the wrong afternoon.

But the script has one idea and repeats it until the wheels come off: Jim behaves badly, Mike enables him, Eva Longoria's Sylvia despairs, then the loop restarts. The nightmare flashbacks are the crudest available shorthand for trauma. The photography is slack, mostly flat daylight with none of the grain or menace the material wants. When the ending finally commits to bloodshed it feels less like a conclusion than like a writer running out of scenes. Bale is stranded, giving a committed and specific performance inside a film that has no idea what it thinks about him.