Training Day

My first watch of 2026, and this might be one of my favourite movies ever now. Denzel gives the most charismatic performance I’ve ever seen as Alonzo Harris to the point where I’m almost sure he improvised most of his dialogue. Alonzo is a hothead, and there’s a false confidence or weak facade with his character that you start to see crack with each pivotal scene. You see the signs that he’s kind of unstable - aiming a gun at Jake while stopping in the middle of traffic, threatening the crackhead based on one little insult, then you see how uncomfortable and almost nervous he gets when sitting down with the three wise men and eventually learn he got in trouble with the Russians based on another little insult. He’s a small man, and his downfall is just so well written. There’s this YouTuber that makes this series called Analysing Evil with one video dedicated to Alonzo Harris that I’m going to tuck in to after I post this review bro😭 I can talk about one of my favourite scenes, the raid in Roger’s house, being the turning point for Jake and when Alonzo properly steps into his role as the villain of the film. Everything seems routine, but once he tells Jake to shoot Roger, it cuts to Alonzo actually looking sinister, with everything except his eyes shrouded in pitch-black darkness. Jake takes the gun, the tension rises, and we get a Dutch angle camera tilt until the situation de-escalates. I love that with every film I watch, I’m starting to notice things like this a lot easier and make sense of the plot. A detail I thought was cool was that Alonzo planned to get Jake high so he could blackmail him, but he was still alert enough to save that girl from being raped in the alley, pick up her wallet and that one act of heroism saved his life with those gang members, getting to Alonzo’s house on time and stopping him. He stood for something! Side note, I just googled this, and it turns out Denzel actually DID improvise a lot of his dialogue, including his iconic King Kong monologue at the end. Fucking hell