So recently I've been on Netflix (great fucking service btw) and I kept seeing this shit pop up. Netflix kept telling me I would totally love it. So I said fuck it and sat down to watch it.
Plot
So the movie centers around the two guys pictured above. The white guy on the left is named Taylor and the Mexican on the right is named Zavala, typically refereed to as Z. At the start of the movie these two get into a shoot out with some criminals. The event is deemed reasonable and the pair gets reinstated and gets back to fighting criminals on the streets of L.A. The criminals of note are mostly a new gang of Mexican cartels into drugs, murder, human trafficking, and basically all manner of bad things. Zavala and Taylor get wrapped up fighting the new thugs.
So on the whole I thought this movie was pretty decent. I do have one major gripe with the movie though. If you take a look at the picture up there you'll notice a small black object on both of their shirts by their name plates. These small objects are cameras. My gripe with this movie is that something close to half of the movie is done with handheld shaky cameras, or ones like those on their shirts, and the cop car dashboard. This means a few things. The video footage is often not great quality, the angles for shots aren't what you'd really want, and the cameras shakes... all... the... damn... time.
They do have a reason for this, Taylor is doing some video project for a class. They mention this once, for about three seconds, then never mention it again. And to compound things, around about halfway through the film they kinda give up on the whole idea. I'm not saying this idea can't be done. I'm of the mind that damn near anything can be done in a movie, it's all about doing it right. The camera work is still done with care. they need to make sure the viewers see the appropriate things at the appropriate times to get the effect right. But just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. This movie didn't need to be filmed this way. I can't even really wrap my head around why the decision was made to film it like this. Was it supposed to be a neat trick to differentiate itself from the billion other buddy cop films? I don't know but on the whole it seemed like it added nothing to the film. Doing a bit is fine, but do it right. And to use a phrase I'm sure you're all familiar with "You're doin it wrong." So it's a needless bit with a shit justification that they don't even follow through on. That's just dumb and the movie suffers for it.
Another small gripe is that the movie is a bit of a slow burn. The first 45-50 minutes of the movie don't have too much going on. It's not needless time filler, there are things happening but nothing really all that exciting. It's just a lot of set up. In fairness the payoff is quite good, but some people might get bored and give up before they get there.
On the whole, as I said, the movie was pretty decent. But there are a couple issues. Totally ok movie, could have been better.
7.5 extremely aggressive, trigger-happy cops out of 10
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