End of Watch

End of Watch
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	David Ayer
Written by	David Ayer
Produced by	David Ayer Matt Jackson John Lesher Jillian Longnecker Alex Ott Ian Watermeier Executive: Jake Gyllenhaal
Starring	Jake Gyllenhaal Michael Peña
Cinematography	Roman Vasyanov
Edited by	Dody Dorn
Music by	David Sardy
Production company	StudioCanal
Distributed by	Open Road Films
Release dates	September 8, 2012 (2012-09-08) (Toronto) September 21, 2012 (2012-09-21) (United States)
Running time	109 minutes
Country	United States
Languages	English Spanish
Budget	$7 million
Box office	$36,375,000

End of Watch is a 2012 American action-drama film written and directed by David Ayer. It stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña as Los Angeles Police Department officers who work in South Central Los Angeles. It was originally scheduled to be released on September 28, 2012, but the release was moved up a week, to September 21.

The title of the movie takes its name from a euphemism used within the law enforcement community for an officer (or officers) killed in the line of duty.

Plot

Brian Taylor and Mike Zavala are close friends and partners in the Los Angeles Police Department. Taylor is filming their police activities for a film project. After shooting two suspects following a high speed chase, the shooting is declared justified by the D.A..

The officers respond to a call regarding a man, Mr. Tre scaring off a mailman while intoxicated. Upon arrival, Tre hurls racist insults at the Hispanic Zavala, who responds by accepting a fight, to Taylor's approval. Zavala beats him soundly and arrests him, but wins the man's respect for not mentioning the fight in the report. Later that night, Tre and his friends are shot at by a group of Latino gang members and one of his friends is killed. The officers find the now-burnt vehicle used in the drive-by the next day, but are shooed off the scene by homicide detectives as well as Van Hauser.

The officers discover two children bound and locked away in a closet and arrest the distressed mother and her drug-addict husband. Taylor begins dating Janet. Taylor has a hunch and determines to scope out the home of the mother of a known gang member and sees an expensive pick up truck in the driveway. A woman walks out of the house and delivers a large soup saucepan with lid to the man in the truck. As the truck drives away, the officers follow and then pull over the man in the truck. As Zavala approaches the driver's window to make contact, the driver suddenly draws a gun and fires. After arresting the driver, the officers find an ornately-decorated, compact .45 Colt automatic pistol, a gold-plated AK-47 rifle, and a large amount of money in his truck (hidden in the soup pot). As revealed later, the money and firearms are connected to a Mexican drug cartel operation in the South Central area.

Days later, the two officers first respond at a house fire that has trapped children on the second floor. When the mother informs them that a third child remains inside, Zavala to rushes to the aid of the remaining child as Taylor reluctantly follows, barely making it out alive. The two are commended and receive the Medal of Valor for their actions, but Taylor has mixed emotions about the situation. Using the house fire incident as leverage, Taylor convinces Zavala to further investigate the South Central incident, to Zavala's chagrin. Arriving at the house, Taylor and Zavala notice suspicious behavior from outside and enter. They arrest another man, who is also in possession of several ornate firearms: a .45 Colt automatic similar to the first one found at the traffic stop, and a Walther PPK. Investigating further, Taylor discovers a hidden stash of Mexican and Asian prisoners, indicating that they have just stumbled upon a human trafficking case. Upon exiting the building, they are accosted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, informed that the man had been a person of interest with possible leads to the cartel, and strongly urged to "lay low" due to possible cartel reprisals. Taylor is left confused and agitated.

Soon after, Zavala's wife Gabby gives birth to the couple's first child, Mike Zavala Jr. One night, the two receive an 'officer needs help' call from Sook, Van Hauser's probationary partner. She fails to give the address and is unable to communicate their location effectively before she screams and the call is cut off. Urgently responding to the call, the two find Van Hauser calmly waiting in front of a building with a knife stabbed into his right eye, warning the two of a large criminal around the corner. Taylor and Zavala grab a shotgun from their car and investigate, finding the man brutally beating Officer Sook. Instead of using deadly force, Taylor orders the suspect to stop, who, surprisingly, immediately stops the assault and surrenders without any sort of resistance. The suspect is detained by Zavala, while Taylor calls for an ambulance and attends to the rookie officer, whose face has been badly injured.

Taylor later marries Janet and, after a night of celebration, Zavala drunkenly, though earnestly, tells Taylor that, should anything happen to him, he will take care of her. After deciding to respond to a more easygoing call the next day, the officers go to investigate a welfare check from an elderly woman. After receiving no response, the officers break down the door and discover the dead homeowner along with a number of dismembered corpses, tortured, and killed by the cartel.

Elsewhere, ICE records surveillance footage of a cartel member speaking on the phone to put a kill order on the officers, and the LA gangsters from the earlier drive-by begin plotting their assassination. While Taylor and Zavala receive no warning from the LAPD or ICE, Tre, having a higher level of respect for Zavala after the earlier fight, warns them of rumors that they are now hot targets for the cartel, but they disregard his comments, saying "We're cops, everyone wants to kill us."

Janet becomes pregnant shortly after the marriage. After a short pursuit with a reckless minivan one night, the officers chase the driver into an apartment complex, where the gangsters have set up an ambush to kill them. The officers are fired upon with AK-47 assault rifles and Officer Taylor is shot in the hand, destroying his radio. Taking refuge in a small apartment, Taylor decides that they are going to have to gun their way out. The two open fire, suppressing the gunmen, and end up killing a shooter on the way out of the complex. Awaiting backup outside, the two are fired upon once more and Taylor is shot in the chest. Zavala kills the shooter, desperately attends to Taylor, and cries out for backup, but Taylor remains unresponsive. Zavala begins to believe Taylor is dying and cries in mourning, while frantically calling for backup. Realizing that the gangsters from inside the apartment have approached behind him, Zavala reaches for his firearm, but is repeatedly shot in the back. As a last-ditch effort to save his partner, he throws his body over the seriously wounded Taylor, protecting him from further injury, at the cost of his own life. Backup eventually arrives and a brief shootout ensues. The gangsters, including "Big Evil", are shot and killed when they refuse to drop their weapons and spray shots at the backup officers.

Zavala is killed in his effort to save Taylor, but it is revealed that Taylor survived the encounter and was able to attend his deceased partner's funeral.

The last scene shows the two officers on the day of the shooting, where Zavala tells a funny story where when he was younger, he was about to be intimate with Gabby but her parents unexpectedly came home. He had to hide under her parents' bed and hearing them have sex.

Cast

• Jake Gyllenhaal as Brian Taylor
• Michael Peña as Mike Zavala
• Natalie Martinez as Gabby
• Anna Kendrick as Janet
• David Harbour as Van Hauser
• Frank Grillo as Sarge
• America Ferrera as Orozco
• Cle Sloan as Mr. Tre
• Jaime FitzSimons as Captain Reese
• Cody Horn as Davis
• Shondrella Avery as Bonita
• Maurice Compte as Big Evil
• Yahira 'Flakiss' Garcia as La La
• Kristy Wu as Sook

Production

Writer-director David Ayer wrote End of Watch in six days. After Jake Gyllenhaal received the script, he read it in one hour and immediately contacted Ayer. Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña underwent five months of training for their roles as officers of the Newton Division of the Los Angeles Police Department. The training included 12-hour ride-alongs with multiple Greater Los Angeles Area law enforcement agencies up to three times a week. Ayer said in September 2012, "I wrote the first draft in December of 2010, four months later I was in pre-production, and a few months later I was shooting the movie. We shot in August of last summer. It took 13 months to finish it, which is crazy quick. Normally it's not like that."

End of Watch was filmed on location in South Central Los Angeles. Ayer had specific details about "photographic style" in the script "to help people involved in the movie to understand the photography and why we were seeing what we were seeing", explaining that "the script started as a pure found footage kind of thing. In pre-production, I gravitated very quickly towards augmenting that stuff with normal operating cameras. In editing, I had all this footage, which me and my editor built the movie out of, with never worrying about genre expectation."

Reception

The film has received positive reviews from critics. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 86% based on reviews from 131 critics, and reports a rating average of 7.1 out of 10 with the consensus "End of Watch has the energy, devotion to characters, and charismatic performances to overcome the familiar pitfalls of its genre and handheld format". At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 70 based on 35 reviews.

External links

• End of Watch at IMDb
• End of Watch at AllMovie
• End of Watch at Box Office Mojo
• End of Watch at Rotten Tomatoes
• End of Watch at Top Hollywood Movies
• End Of Watch at Movie Reviews by Incoherentboy