Early into my career, I had the good fortune to see a rough cut of Training Day months before the film was released. It was ragged in places, and the script has some questionable plot logic, coincidences that still exist in the final cut, but from the moment Jake (Ethan Hawke) sits down at the diner and meets Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington) we are watching one of our greatest actors completely in the creative zone, and another about to finally level up past indie dramas. I had fairly low expectations from an Antoine Fuqua film, but he captures some of the rougher neighborhoods in Los Angeles in a way that fits this story, not just a copy of the popular series “The Shield” from the time period. When Jake climbs the stairs to the instrumental version of “Rap Superstar,” I knew it wasn’t just Denzel who was in The Zone.
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