Watched on Blu-Ray

The sunrise over Los Angeles determines the picture frame. The day begins. Cut. The look in Officer Jake Hoyt's (Ethan Hawke) eyes sets the scene. The working day begins and a twenty-four hour window of time opens. After Jake Hoyt has spent nineteen months as a patrolman, this day, his "training day", offers him the chance to make the leap into the drug squad and one day become a detective. When his wife tells him shortly before leaving the house that he shouldn't mess it up, he acknowledges her admonishing words by reloading his service weapon. Perhaps this scene in "Training Day" already illustrates that Jake will learn today that you can't just have conversations with words, as his new superior, Detective Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington), will teach him.

One of the best scenes in "Training Day" is probably the first meeting of Ethan Hawke and Denzel Washington in a diner, as their characters are already fully fleshed out in their first dialogue, but as a viewer you still feel like you're in a situation of hesitation. You don't really want to believe that Alonzo Harris is a self-centred asshole who doesn't give a damn about good, clean police work. You'd rather see him as a gruff vigilante, perhaps a little disillusioned but still realising what he's about. However, Antoine Fuqua quickly dispels this pretence, which is probably the film's greatest weakness. Because, without a doubt, even if Ethan Hawke and especially the Oscar-winning Denzel Washington play big here, their characters come from the drawing board.

As we have come to expect from Antoine Fuqua, "Training Day" is also completely overloaded with testosterone. Women appear here either as incredibly beautiful mistresses (Eva Mendes) or as drug addicts. It is a pure, violence-fuelled male domain that "Training Day" tells of - and thus also a domain of misguided ideals and profile neuroses. The fact that the transgressions committed by the men - and Alonzo in particular - are explicitly isolated from Jake Hoyt makes his character appear all the more pale. In any case, it is impossible for Ethan Hawke to compete with the gigantic charisma of Denzel Washington. But perhaps that is also the method in this film: perhaps "Training Day" has tried to take the subjective perspective of Hoyt in order to illustrate what it is like to be forced to play chess, even though you have only spent your whole life playing draughts.

However, "Training Day" really only knows good cop and bad cop, only good and bad, only wolves and sheep. The role models that Fuqua persistently (over)stylises are correspondingly flat, undemanding and to some extent reactionary. In any case, there is no question of ambivalent nuances here; the mentally ill Alonzo fulfils the cliché of the corrupt antagonist acting out of personal motivation, while Jake Hoyt is the paragraph-riding clean man - and thus the pure conscience of the film. If "Training Day" wasn't so extremely stylish and grippingly staged (as well as being infused with impressive acting performances), it would be very difficult to make a positive case for this film. However, the transparent personality profiles become components of a world in which the street is still considered a jungle, a battlefield. A world in which you have to get your hands dirty.