The 2001 thriller Training Day features what might be the 21st century’s first truly great villain: Denzel Washington’s Alonzo Harris.
It looks like a typical cop thriller, but Training Day is more than that. It’s about the battle for a man’s soul. About temptation and the narrow path of righteousness. And Denzel Washington plays a singularly charismatic incarnation of the Devil himself.
Directed by Antoine Fuqua and written by David Ayer, Training Day’s steeped in the urban malaise and music of the late 90s and early 2000s. It was released in 2001, in the middle of the unfolding Rampart scandal that eventually brought down dozens of corrupt police officers. Its soundtrack includes Cypress Hill and Nelly, while its cast includes such musicians as Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg and Macy Gray (Eminem was at one stage due to co-star).
Training Day emerges as more than a product of its time, however; partly thanks to the work of its writer and director, but overwhelmingly because of the sparks that fly between Washington and co-star Ethan Hawke. It could be argued that Washington’s Detective Alonzo Harris is one of the 21st century’s first truly great screen villains.
Within just a few minutes, Ayer and Fuqua establish the central dynamic that serves as Training Day’s battleground. Jake Hoyte (Hawke) is a young LA cop who has dreams of running his own division and, with it, the trappings of big-shot success. He’s given the chance to work with Alonzo, who runs a small undercover narcotics squad; if Jake can impress his new boss, he could get a permanent spot on the team.
From the moment they meet, however, Alonzo’s probing at Jake’s moral boundaries. Jake’s told not to bother showing up at the precinct for the morning’s roll call like a regular cop; while they’re driving around in Alonzo’s tricked-out 1978 Monte Carlo, Jake’s told not to tell police HQ their whereabouts; “Bad guys are listening. Don’t trust the radios. Never let anyone know where you’re really at,” Alonzo says.
Immediately, Alzono establishes himself as a master manipulator: repeatedly putting Jake in his place, cutting him off mid-sentence, and mocking his anecdote about an early-career drug bust. It’s all a calculated attempt to wear Jake down; as the day unfolds, and the younger cop sees the veteran detective’s maverick approach to arrests and rough street justice, he’s both appalled and also faintly over-awed. Alonzo offers a glimpse into a world where he creates laws and passes judgement on the spot, whether it’s confiscating drugs from students who’ve strayed in a rough part of town or beating up an attempted rapist down a back alley.
It’s Alonzo gradually turning up the heat, showing Jake another boundary before inviting him to cross it. At what point will Jake’s conscience and duty kick in? That’s the tension that lies beneath every scene as the story brings us to the point where we learn the real reason why Alonzo’s zeroed in on Jake.
Washington’s performance is, quite simply, extraordinary. Alonzo Harris is monstrous in his cunning and viciousness, but also charismatic enough that we can immediately see why Jake would fall under his spell. A great deal of that spark is in Ayer’s original script, but comparing the written word to Fuqua’s final cut, you can see how Washington’s improvisations and embellishments bring the character to life.
The late, roaring monologue (“King Kong ain’t got shit on me…!) was famously Washington’s, but so too were smaller moments, like his mocking exclamation of “Aww! You lied to me. You lied to me” when he finds a crack pipe hidden in an hoodlum’s pocket. This is a character who revels in his own power and cruelty for its own sake.
Fuqua, similarly, was the perfect filmmaker to bring Training Day to the screen. Brought in by Washington, it was Fuqua’s idea to shoot the film in real LA districts, and with real gang members among the cast. What’s more, Fuqua recognised elements of his own upbringing and the violence he saw in the script and in Alonzo himself.
“Training Day – I grew up with that,” Fuqua told me in 2014. “I’ve seen that. I know that guy. That guy choked me out before. I was just a kid who was playing basketball and walking home with my friends. You just go, ‘Well, what is that?’ It’s all about the abuse of power.”
Making Training Day was, Fuqua said, “intense.” He and his wife were mourning the loss of a child during filming; meanwhile, he was “in the middle of dealing with Bloods, Crips, gangs, Alonzo…”
“It was tense, every day making that movie,” Fuqua said. “My memories of that movie are so intense. I didn’t even do this kind of publicity on that movie – I went to Venice, and I think that was about it. I needed to step away from it for a bit. I knew all these gang members and so I needed to get myself away from that. As a director, you immerse yourself, or I do. You become a part of it. Your lens is another character, and all of a sudden, you find yourself in it too much. I had to pull away from it. That’s my memory of Training Day.”
Fuqua must have had some inkling that he was making something special, however. During the filming of one of Jake and Alonzo’s lengthy driving sequences, the director leaned in and said something to the effect of, “You get this right, Ethan, and you’re gonna get nominated for an Oscar.”
His instincts were dead on: Hawke was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 2002 Academy Awards; Washington deservedly won Best Actor.
None of this is to say that Training Day is a perfect film. Its dramatic tension is punctured right at its zenith by a plot convenience that almost threatens to pull the viewer out of the movie, for example. But Fuqua’s decision to ground his story in the cracked, simmering streets of LA’s vast suburbs does much to cover up that contrivance – as does Washington’s imposing performance.
There’s often a sense that, even in less heavyweight roles like Robert McCall in The Equalizer or Macrinus in Gladiator II, Washington’s drawing on some undercurrent of emotion – that for all the energy he projects through his character, there’s far more of it brewing beneath the surface. “He’s so full of life and witty,” Fuqua concurred years ago. “But I know him, and I can also see that… thing. Rumbling. It’s like a volcano in a bottle. It can just erupt.”
It’s that energy that brings Alonzo Harris so vividly to life, and in turn, drives Training Day to its furious ending.
Hannibal Lecter; Hans Gruber; Norman Bates; all kinds of names come up in lists of great screen villains. Thanks to Washington, Alonzo Harris is arguably as fearsome and magnetic as any of them.
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