Harsh Times

dir: David Ayer
[img_assist|nid=826|title=Christian Bale going after a cinematographer again|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=365|height=243]
This was touted as a kind of follow-up to Training Day, since it had the same writer involved, now graduating to the big leagues by taking on directorial duties as well. Hoo-fucking-ray. And since we were told it would be a sequel to that horribly scripted film with incredible performances, we could look forward to more of the same.

Denzel got the Oscar for Training Day, but I don’t think Harsh Times is going to win any awards, despite having exactly the same quantity of overacting in it. Substitute Christian Bale in place of Denzel, and make him a returned Ranger veteran with post traumatic stress disorder instead of being a nasty, corrupt cop, and you have Harsh Times, set on the mean streets of San Andreas. I mean, Los Angeles.

Though it sounds from its title to be a Charles Dickens story (that’d be Hard Times instead), Harsh Times deals with a few days in the lives of two friends, Jim (Christian Bale) and Mike (Freddy Rodriguez, best known for playing Federico on Six Feet Under). Jim has recently been discharged from the army after serving in one of America's many conflict zones overseas. The film starts with images depicting some of the work he got up to on his missions, which generally involves killing people swiftly and brutally. On the side of truth, justice and the American way, of course.

Upon returning to his home town, his plan is to join the LAPD in order to put his skills to good use. Mike is also out of work, and keeps being badgered by his lovely but nagging partner Sylvia (Eva Longoria) into finding a job too. To make it sound all contemporary, Mike previously worked as a programmer, and now believes such work is ungettable in LA because all that work has shifted to India.

Jim and Mike are childhood friends, which is clear from the way they keep speaking like they’re both from the barrio, the way they keep calling each other ‘dog’ all the time, and the constant touching in the form of handshakes and hand touching gestures. They do this so frequently for the duration of the film that it gets almost distracting, like listening to someone with a stutter.

Clearly they’ve known each other a long time, clearly they’ve drunk a lot of booze and done a lot of drugs together for a long time, which makes them closer than brothers. But the ‘adult’ world in which they are supposed to be living in seems a little bit out of their grasp.

Instead of actively looking for work, Jim and Mike start cruising round the streets of South Central Los Angeles, drinking and smoking dope and reliving past glories. Jim commits some petty crimes, they get in trouble with some other local hoods, they visit old friends and past girlfriends along Memory Lane.

At the same time as the story seems to be meandering along, we’re meant to be getting the impression that everything isn’t entirely right with Jim, who seems a bit damaged by his wartime experiences. Rejected by the LAPD, he is given the chance of work with the Office of Homeland Security, with whom it might be his last chance to get the kind of work he wants.

Since he hasn’t really been looking for work, and because he does practically whatever Jim wants, Mike’s regressive behaviour seems to piss off his partner, who feels like she’s going out with a child. And it’s true, Mike is a bit of a child, easily swayed by Mike who he clearly admires and loves, and he seems more than happy to regress to the good ol’ days of drinking 40s in the morning and getting fucked up before noon.

This kind of dynamic is immediately reminiscent of the Training Day dynamic between the characters played by Washington and Ethan Hawke; as in you have one person that really overacts and another always trying to catch up. Or, you could say you have one really dominant character, and one who is initially dominated by them until they see their own doom in being dragged into their orbit.

The thing is, both Training Day and Harsh Times have terrible problems in their scripts which sink both films, in my opinion. The performances, the setting and some of the themes have interest and resonance. But they’re both ultimately sunk by idiotic plot turns that undo whatever good acting work goes on beforehand.

Training Day had a stupid ending and had a character survive certain death because of the most idiotic of plot machinations and coincidences. I like to think of it as deux stupido ex machina: a movie ending derived from something stupid coming out of nowhere rather than a half-way intelligent script.

The last part of the film, whilst meant to be emotionally wrenching, to seems more like Ayer had no sensible way for the film to end, and decided to come up with the dumbest ending possible, again dependant on a stupid coincidence in order to occur.

We keep being told that Jim’s out of control, and different, and all deranged, but none of it really makes sense. I understand the concept of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the manner in which it could make a psychologically fragile person go berserk, but it doesn’t explain much of anything that happens in the plot as the story goes on.

I can accept that there is a self-destructive quality to much of Jim’s increasingly erratic behaviour, and a desire to drag Mike down with him because he craves the simplicity of their earlier days. But I can’t accept a lot of what Jim does, especially the stuff in Mexico with his girlfriend towards the end, and the moronic ending as having anything to do with these characters.

The test I use for whether an ending fits a story and the characters in it is to ask myself, “Self, does that ending make sense considering who the characters are and what they’ve been doing for the last couple of hours, and if it does/doesn’t, could that ending be used with just about any characters?” If the ending could have happened to any generic set of characters, because the plot isn’t worked out organically, but by process, as I believe it is here, then it’s a bad ending.

And this has a bad ending. I guess you could argue why dumb characters were obligated to commit these dumb sequences of acts in order to lead to the ending, and how strong the internal consistency of the plot holds up, but when it’s dependent on a completely happenstance coincidence in order to occur, it’s a nonsensical ending that says nothing about the characters because it’s so bloody contrived.

It earns a bit of goodwill along the way by its depiction of childhood friends relating to their world, and trying to deal with the concept of their arrested adolescence ending and their adult lives beginning in earnest, but it squanders it all by the time the end rocks around. I just didn’t buy it. I am the first to admit that Christian Bale is a superb actor, but not in this. His performance rings hollow towards the end and especially in his final scenes. And I’m not entirely sure if I bought him as the whiteboy chicano who’d grown up in the barrio.

But he’s the least of the film’s problems. At least he and Freddy Rodriguez do a good job of playing their roles as long time friends with an unhealthy dynamic to their relationship and with probably not a lot in common anymore.

4 reasons the ending to this film needs to be taken out and shot out of 10

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“I see dumb people.” – Harsh Times.