END OF WATCH - Review

I DON'T DO THIS VERY OFTEN BUT THERE ARE SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW SO IF YOU'RE INTERESTED IN KNOWING WHAT I GAVE THIS MOVIE I GAVE IT AN 8/10 KEEP READING IF YOU WANT BUT YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. 

End of Watch

1 hour 50 minutes
Drama, 2012
Written/Directed by David Ayer

Starring
Jake Gyllenhaal
Michael Peña
Anna Kendrick
Natalie Martinez

"We're cops, everybody wants to kill us."

Among all of the found footage movies, I think that End of Watch really stands out. Taking place over the course of several months, the film follows a bald Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña as two LAPD officers who find themselves in trouble when they fuck with some cartel members.
The film's strongest suit is easily the performances of Gyllenhaal and Peña. These guys are completely believable not only as cops, but as brothers. The two have perfect chemistry with each other, which really helps the somewhat flimsy plot.
As much as I enjoy End of Watch's story, I have to bring up the whole trope of "wrong place, wrong time." On a couple of occasions, these guys just happen to find cartel stuff. Happen to find cartel stuff. Okay, at one point, they do some detective work and go looking for it, but that aside a couple of really huge reveals come off of these occasions. And the movie does these reveals very well. There are only a couple, but they're completely unexpected and work very well to the film's advantage.
But the thing that bothered me the most was the language of the cartel members. They're all Hispanic and do that thing where they speak english but throw in random Spanish here and there, but only like one word in a sea of English. It just comes off as a little annoying. If they're all Hispanic, why not just pick one language? They also spend the whole time yelling at each other and swearing constantly to the point where it's extremely annoying. In fact, even the police officers do that too. Don't get me wrong, I love dropping "fuck," as well as variations of "fuck" but this movie just abuses it. Fuck is a graceful and beautiful word, but when you drop it so harshly at an insanely constant rate, it becomes weak. The cartel members just come off as being very generic, cookie-cutter hispanic gangster villains that we've seen in every Robert Rodriguez movie ever. These baddies just have no heart to them. They get angry and yell a lot and that's about it.
I really don't mean to come off as being racist, I'm just saying what I think in what is probably not a very graceful way.
Another thing: why are we able to see the cartel members? Every time we get a glimpse of someone other than these cops we see someone filming the action because it's so convenient that people have video cameras and like to record gangsters doing gangster things... because that's really intelligent... while cinematically and for story purposes it makes perfect sense, it takes away from what is established early on in the film: Gyllenhaal's reason for filming is because he's taking a filmmaking class. So where the fuck did this other footage come from? Just something small that bugged me.

I know I spend a lot of time complaining about what is wrong with the movie, but I really did enjoy it. Aside from a few illogical things, the performances and dialogue keep the film afloat. It's got some great twists here and there and all grips aside it's a good movie.

8/10