areatw Shot documentary style, 'End of Watch' is a fascinating and insightful police drama. The film benefits from two brilliant lead performances from Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña, who bring energy and personality to their roles as officers Taylor & Zavala. 'What the film lacks in term of plot development it more than makes up for in entertainment value, with some intense action scenes, genuinely funny moments and a great script.Part of the reason the ending is so hard-hitting is because it's easy for the audience to build a connection with the two officers. They are both realistic and relatable characters and, by the time the end of the film comes about, it feels like you know them personally. 'End of Watch' is a great film, both an intense action drama and a realistic and fascinating insight into daily life of a police officer.

George Taylor This might have been a decent movie, but I found it hard to sit through since they went with the found footage idea, which I hate.

mrozman-1 A certain ethnic mafia has overtaken the streets and corralled the African American population into different neighborhoods as they have taken over and conduct their business, whether it be human traffic, drugs, weapons, and murder for hire. I think the acting was great, and although a lot of people get so sucked into the movie and want to know if various scenes are exactly the way things go, I can safely say, "of course not" but this is a very accurate movie about how things really happen. Cops grow close in some relationships, especially when they are under such pressure and the possibility of life-threatening scenarios occurs. The viewer will be thoroughly entertained and if reading this review before they're watching can consider this movie to be a very real example of what might be seen over the career of a police officer in this part of Los Angeles. The sound track is also outstanding and I think they use the music to intensify the impact of various scenes, truly a music integration job well done. This movie is truly, in my opinion, "a 10" and I have heard friends that are police officers say the same thing. This is the first time I have ever given a movie a rating of 10.

dromasca The fact that David Ayer is both the sole author of the script and the director of 'End of Watch' is quite interesting. If two different individuals would have written the script and directed the movie, respectively, I could have commented that the thin story written by the script writer had to be balanced by the film director, and he picked an interesting manner of filming based on some not very solid pretext in order to achieve what is an interesting movie. As the two are one - David Ayer - I am guessing that the idea about how to make this movie came first and the story was built around it. Of course, this is just a guess.Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Peña) and a couple of patrolling cops in the violent low-class districts of LA. One is a WASP, the other is Mexican. They are exemplary cops, actually too good to be true, the kind of cops that save kids from burning houses at the risk of their lives and get decorated for their deeds. They are more than friends, they are brothers, share all secrets, dance at each other's weddings and hold new born kids. They live and fight crime together and are ready to die together. And death eventually comes after them. Violent and unfair as they live in a violent and unfair world. Ours.All this is nice, but, frankly speaking, it does not make for a too interesting story. Actually what really happens on screen is not too much and it's also very predictable. I could put a rather safe bet that at the end one of the cops dies, the other survives to see his funeral, the only question is which fate each of the two will be to occur. There is actually so little action in the film that the script-writer / director added a few minutes at the end describing facts having happened previous to the ending that do not add anything to the story.With no real action to put on screen David Ayer tries to catch our attention with describing the details of the relationship between the two cops and with their colleagues, in the style made famous by 'The Wire' TV series. I like this part, which was supported by the excellent acting of Jake Gyllenhaal (one of my preferred actors) and Michael Peña . The second film directing trick is to use hand-held camera for part of the time. The pretext is the passion of one of the cops for documenting his work, which is mirrored by a similar hobby of one of the gangsters. It is this kind of technology-based detail which became obsolete one or two years after the time the film was made (2012) when any smartphone became a hand-held video camera with social networking becoming a repository and mean of communicating and transferring video files. We are left with an experiment which does not harm too much and makes the viewing of the film more interesting.At the end, I feel like 'End of Watch' despite its qualities risks to disappoint the two categories of viewers that it seems to target. Action movies fans will be disappointed by the too short and too simple cop story. Quality cop dramas fans will be disappointed because the heroes do not enjoy enough time on screen to develop their friendship and make a difference in the violent world that they deal with on daily basis. Both claims could have been solved by a more complex and interesting story and script, but 'End of Watch' did not have one.