Blog From The Bench

Harsh Times
Director: David Ayer
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Like a weird amalgamation of the harsh street life portrayed in Training Day fueled by the psychotropic drug hallucinations of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, Harsh Times is a film brimming over with passion, enthusiasm, anger and intensity, but in desperate need of a rewrite or two.

Jim (Christian Bale, Batman Begins) is back from his tour of duty in the Middle East, and has returned home to South Central LA to reunite with his best friend Mike (Freddy Rodriguez, Six Feet Under) and celebrate with some serious drinking. Jim has always been the crazy one out of his group of friends, but the tour of duty seems to have affected him deeply. He has reoccurring nightmares of horrible atrocities and violence when he falls asleep, and the anger seems to be brimming to the surface more and more. After failing a psychiatric exam applying for the LAPD, Jim hits the streets, drinking, smoking up and lashing out at everyone around him.

When he unexpectedly receives a phone call from Homeland Security inviting him to an interview, things seem to be looking up for Jim, but he finds it difficult to get his life on track. Likewise, Mike is trying to get on the straight and narrow with his girlfriend and find a job, but Jim seems to be something of a bad influence, and the two spend most of their time getting messed up.

But when the government offers him a black ops assignment, Jim’s life is turned upside down. They recognize the violence that brims so close to the surface of Jim’s psyche is about to erupt, and want to tap its fury for their own devices. Jim’s life is thrown for a loop, and he begins to lose the ability to distinguish the harsh streets of LA from the battlegrounds of the Middle East, with horrifying consequences…

Director David Ayer (who, coincidentally, wrote Training Day) has constructed a deeply personal and intense film based largely on his own experiences living on the harsh streets of South Central Los Angeles. The film is hard and cold as a gun barrel, virtually overflowing with emotional outbursts of rage, guilt, Iraqi invasion politics and paranoia. The problem with such deeply personal films, of course, is that the film gluts itself on nostalgia and intense outbursts rather than focus on the best interests of the film itself.

Well directed, well acted and intense as all get-out, Harsh Times needs some tightening up, especially in the dialogue. I can’t believe that people actually talk like Bale and Rodriguez talk in this film – they drop more ‘duuuudes’ than Bill & Ted. Ayer as a scribe has the passion down (Training Day, Dark Blue, S.W.A.T) but the film left me oddly unfulfilled, like an argument that rages on long after the point where you have any emotional investment left. The endless barrage of alcohol, drugs, guns, violence (both mental and physical) comes together like something out of a nightmare, the intensity of which precludes any possible enjoyment of the film itself.

Harsh Times is aptly named, and probably worth a rental when it catches some distribution, but it didn’t sit very well with me. Intense and violent, it lacks the cohesion that drove Training Day to fantastic success, and instead focuses on sporadic outbursts of aggression for the sake of aggression.

Verdict: 70