Tag: Harris Yulin

Training Day (2001)

Pulsating corrupt-cop drama, highly entertaining with a full-throttle Denzel Washington

Director: Antoine Fuqua

Cast: Denzel Washington (Detective Alonzo Harris), Ethan Hawke (Officer Jake Hoyt), Scott Glenn (Roger), Tom Berenger (Stan Gursky LAPD), Harris Yulin (Doug Rosselli LAPD), Raymond J Barry (Lou Jacobs LAPD), Cliff Curtis (Smiley), Dr Dre (Officer Paul), Snoop Dogg (Blue), Macy Gray (Sandman’s wife), Charlotte Ayanna (Lisa), Eva Mendes (Sara)

“King Kong ain’t got nothing on me!” That’s the mantra of larger-than-life legendary cop Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington), who has immersed himself so much in the dirty neighbourhood gangland of LA that it’s hard to see where cop ends and crook begins. Alonso claims to believe to keep the town clean, you gotta break a few rules. But then he also believes in filling his own pockets with stolen money. It’s all going to come to a head in one day: first day on the job for ambitious boy-scout officer Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) who thinks he’s auditioning to join an elite squad only to find he’s the victim of a series of elaborate mind-games and dodgy moves by Alonzo, testing to see whether he is potential asset or sacrificial pawn. It’s going to be a long day.

Training Day is basically a massive dance with the devil, offering his little Faustus all the wonders of the world in return for his soul. It’s all there for Hoyt’s taking: respect, glory, standing – and of course oodles of plastic-wrapped dollar bills. All he has to do is sacrifice every inch of his integrity and personal morality to Alonzo Harris, a grandstanding Mephistopheles. This first day is all about Harris pushing Hoyt to see how far he will go. Will he smoke a little dope so he could pass as an undercover druggie? Will he search a house under a false warrant? Will he rough up a suspect? Will he murder a drugdealer and steal his cash?

Throughout all this, Denzel Washington barnstorms to fantastic Oscar-winning effect. This is a delightfully Devilish performance, Washington leaving it all out on the pitch. Alonzo Harris has inhabited the persona of the gangsters he follows for so long he’s basically become one. Harris is scarily charismatic, the unshakeable confident cool he uses to cow and terrify criminals and punks on the street, also making him a hugely attractive figure. This is despite his complete amorality, his ruthless capacity for violence and his shocking willingness to abuse and use almost everyone around him. He does all this by convincing Hoyt for long stretches that his poor treatment, abuse and deception of him is all in Hoyt’s own interest: to toughen up this naïve puppy into a killer.

Hoyt spends half the time if this is some elaborate show-and-test. Who can blame him? Washington’s exuberance plays masterfully on the edges of someone putting on a massive performance. There are neat moment where we see how fragile some of Harris’ control is, once he is outside of his comfort zone: he’s in hoc for millions to Russian gangsters and as events of the day pile up his thermonuclear self-confidence tips into moments of impotent fury. Washington is fantastic as this street monster, whose seductive lines on modern policing (do a little bad to do a greater good) start off sounding like common sense before you realise they tip quickly into justifying open criminality. It’s a performance of perfect physical swagger matched with his limitless charisma, inverting the qualities that made him a perfect Steve Biko or Malcolm X into a Lectorish monster.

Ethan Hawke is also extremely good as his polar opposite, the eager to please rookie who realises there is a lot more going on here than he thought. Training Day suggests there may well be a middle ground between Hoyt’s straight-as-an-arrow idea of policing and Harris’ corruption – and it’s part of Harris’ appeal that his perverted mentoring ends up making Hoyt a tougher, more unrelenting (better?) cop than he was before. But also, Hawke is great at showing that Hoyt (under his sheen of moral uprightness) is also a tough, hardened professional. In classic story-telling style, Harris is a dark reflection of Hoyt: they share a stubbornness, a conviction that they are right, a refusal to be intimidated (Hoyt may nervously try to please Harris at first, but once he realises the score he refuses to be forced into doing anything he doesn’t want to do) and a capacity for throwing themselves into decisive action. There is a reason why this rookie can get the drop on Harris – much to his wicked mentor’s delight and admiration – in a way no one else can.

That alone shows the dark magnetism of people like Harris: like Hoyt we end up wanting their approval even when we hate or fear them. Even as he holds a shotgun to his head, there is a part of Hoyt you suspect is proud that Harris’ gut reaction is to shout an impressed “My man!”. Of course Harris knows his validation is important to people. Monsters like this know the weaker-willed crave their respect. But then Harris also knows no one else in his team – all of them weak-willed bullies, desperately trying to imitate them – have even a quarter of the independence of mind Hoyt has.

What Harris under-estimates is Hoyt’s survival instinct. The final third of the film, the clash that has been building inevitably between these two, again demonstrates both their similarities and their fundamental differences. The main difference between them being Hoyt cares for, and protects others, and Harris cares only about himself. Hoyt’s humanitarianism will save him from dangerous situations and even Harris’ girlfriend (a tough-but-cowed performance from Eva Mendes) recognises Hoyt has shown more concern for her son in a few minutes than his father, Harris, ever has in his whole life.

The final act of Training Day hinges a little too much on one whopper of a coincidence: the sort of narrative contrivance so colossal that, in a less magnetic film, you’d be throwing stuff at the TV shouting “oh come on!” It’s final, inevitable, confrontation between Harris and Hoyt feels rather too much like many, many other films before it in every single beat, while the ending has a whiff of Hays Code morality (all wrongs righted!) about it that rather undermines the edgy, unpredictable film it precedes.

But when Training Day focuses on the sound and the fury of Washington and the Faustian dance on the deep grey lines of street policing, this is a sensational, energetic and highly watchable cop thriller, pulsatingly directed by Antonie Fuqua. With Washington superb and Hawke easy to overlook as his straight-laced partner, it’s a character study that constantly shifts our expectations and leaves us genuinely worried about the fate of its hero. The sort of slick entertainment Hollywood does at its best.

Clear and Present Danger (1994)

Tom Clancy’s door-stop thriller is turned into an involving conspiracy thriller that makes masterful use of Harrison Ford

Director: Philip Noyce

Cast: Harrison Ford (Jack Ryan), Willem Dafoe (John Clark), Anne Archer (Dr Cathy Ryan), Joaquim de Almeida (Colonel Felix Cortez), Miguel Sandoval (Ernesto Escobedo), Henry Czerny (Bob Ritter), Harris Yulin (James Cutter), Donald Moffat (President Bennett), Benjamin Bratt (Captain Ramirez), Raymond Cruz (Domingo Chavez), James Earl Jones (Jim Greer), Tim Grimm (Dan Murray), Hope Lange (Senator Mayo)

Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan has always been the All-American hero (his slimy, besuited CIA rival even frustratedly snarls “you are such a Boy Scout”). Ryan is almost too-good-to-be-true: pure as the driven snow, incorruptible, a success at everything he does and a devoted family man. What chance does someone like that have in Washington? In Clear and Present Danger, Ryan is dragged into the War on Drugs, unwittingly becoming the front man for an illegal military assault team against the Columbian cartels, ordered by a US President on a vendetta for the death of a friend. When the truth comes out, you’ve got one guess who takes it on himself to save the soldiers who are hung out to dry by the suits in Washington.

We know he’ll do the right thing as well, because he’s played by Harrison Ford. Ryan is basically a blank slate as a character, so Ford’s straight-as-an-arrow everyman decency does most of the heavy lifting to establish who he is. As an action hero, Ford has the chops but his real strength is his ability to look frazzled, scared and muddling through – rather like the rest of us would. Ryan gets in some real scrapes here, from dodging missiles in an attack on a diplomatic convoy to desperately fighting for his life in a timber factory. Ford’s strength as an actor is to be both authoritative and also vulnerable – his willingness to look scared but determined works wonders.

Clear and Present Danger also gives plenty of scope for Ford to employ his other major empathetic weapon: the clenched jaw and pointed figure of moral outrage. He does a lot of both here, a central scene seeing Ryan confronting besuited rival Ritter (played by a weaselly, bespectacled Henry Czerny, the polar opposite of Ford’s clean-cut everyman-ness) earnestly telling him he broke the law and is heading to jail (laughed off). There can’t be an actor more skilled at getting you to invest in someone, to both simultaneously worry about him while being confident he will do the right thing. It’s a rare gift, and Clear and Present Danger exploits it to the max.

Ford is the centrepiece – and main strength – of a competent, well-made conspiracy thriller, directed with a professional assurance by Philip Noyce. It makes a good fist of translating Clancy’s doorstop novel – with its huge complexities – to the screen (although you might need a couple of viewings to work out the twisty-turny, backstabby plot, where wicked schemers turn on their own schemes). Noyce has a special gift for keeping dense technical and exposition scenes lively. At one point he cross-cuts a parallel investigation into a fake car bombing between Ryan (who flicks doggedly through textbooks) and his Cartel rival who employs gadgetry and computers. Plot heavy scenes like this are well-shot, pacey and capturing plenty of reaction shots, even if they only feature characters messaging each other on clunky 90s computers or walking-and-talking in shadowy metaphors.

Clear and Present Danger also successful juggles its Washington shenanigans, with parallel intrigue in its Columbia setting. There ruthlessly charming Cortes (played with a wonderful cocksure suaveness by Joaquim de Almeida) is scheming to takeover his boss’ (a blustering Miguel Sandoval) operation. These plot unfold both together and in parallel, allowing for a little bit of neat commentary contrasting the cartels and Washington. The film manages a bit of critique of America’s thoughtlessly muscular intrusion into the affairs of other countries, with a President turning a blind eye after passing on implicit instructions (but still with a boy scout hero who will sort it all out).

Noyce also pulls out the stops for a couple of brilliantly executed scenes. Great editing, sound design and committed acting makes a scene where Luddite Ryan races to print off incriminating evidence from a shared drive while technically assured Ritter deletes the files, edge-of-the seat stuff. Never before has racing to fill a printer with paper seemed more exciting.

That pales into significance with the film’s centre piece, a genuinely thrilling Cartel ambush on a US diplomatic convoy, with Ryan stuck in the middle. With perfect build-up – from James Horner’s tense score to the skilful editing – the attack (with Oscar nominated sound design) is hugely tense, leaves our heroes terrifyingly powerless and is flawlessly executed by Noyce and his crew. It makes the whole film a must watch all on its own.

It’s surrounded by several other well-handled action set pieces, featuring the Marines sent on a covert mission (and then hung out to dry). As the operation leader, Willem Dafoe plays very successfully against type as a (ruthless) good guy, as Clancy’s other regular character, uber-fixer John Clark. Dafoe also has the chops to go toe-to-toe with Ford, and like de Almedia’s charmingly wicked Cartel-fixer also serves as another neat contrast to Ryan’s decency-with-a-fist.

The film is rounded out by a troop of reliable actors. Anne Archer has little to do as Ryan’s supportive wife, but Donald Moffat is good value as the shifty President (communicating both intimidating authority and Nixonian survival instinct), Harris Yulin perfectly cast as a President-pleasing apparatchik and Raymond Cruz as an ace but naïve marine sharp-shooter. Clear and Present Danger has few pretensions to be anything other than an involving thriller – but that also helps make it a very enjoyable one.

Scarface (1983)

“Shay hell-o to my leetle friend!” Al Pacino puts it all out there in Scarface

Director: Brian de Palma

Cast: Al Pacino (Tony Montana), Steven Bauer (Manny Ray), Michell Pfeiffer (Elvira), Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (Gina), Robert Loggia (Frank Lopez), Miram Colon (Mama Montana), F. Murray Abraham (Omar), Paul Shenar (Alejandro Sosa), Harris Yulin (Detective Bernstein), Mark Margolis (Shadow)

Remember when Al Pacino played the softly spoken, chillingly self-contained Michael Corleone? Watching The Godfather, who could have imagined that performance would be the outlier in a career that gleefully embraced the insanely OTT in a way few other great actors have dared. And possibly no other performance in Pacino’s career was as large as in Scarface, a ball of nervous energy, foul-mouthed aggression and drug-fuelled instability, the burning heart at the centre of Brian de Palma’s wildfire of a film. Scarface dials every single thing up to about 11 and then some, becoming the director’s brashest and most enduring work – but it owes everything to Pacino’s furious, unreserved energy at its centre.

Pacino plays Tony Montana, a working-class crook from Cuba dispatched (along with boatloads of undesirables from Castro’s regime) to Miami in the early 80s. There, in refugee camps and the local community, it’s crime and violence that give these guys the best chance of grabbing a share of the American Dream. Montana is no different, graduating from hits to drug deals and swiftly moving up the chain with his determination, gruff no-nonsense attitude, fierce loyalty and ruthless focus. But once you hit the top and the world is yours, there is really only one way to go – back down again, made easier when you are hooked on snorting mountains of your own product, incestuously in love with your sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and your increasing arrogance and unreliability put you on the wrong side of your partners and kingpins in South America.

A remake of the 1932 original by Howard Hawks (the film is dedicated to Hawks and the scriptwriter Ben Hecht), Scarface is a brash, unsettling, nervy and incredibly violent cartoon-style gangster movie that owes almost its entire legacy to Pacino’s snarling wit at the centre. Is Pacino taking the piss here with this performance? Surely, he must have wondered if he could get away with it. This is a whirlwind tour-de-force, Pacino throwing himself into it with nothing left in the locker-room. He delightedly wraps his vocal chords around a thick Cuban accent (turning words like cockroach into a three syllable delight – “Cock-ah-roatch”) and embraces his small stature by turning Tony into a little pressure cooker. Seemingly incapable (bar one scene) of staying still, he’s supremely tense, his shoulders hunched up, his teeth on edge, voice growling.

It gives the film an unpredictable energy, because you don’t know what Pacino the performer will do any more than the characters do. He’ll suddenly throw you off with a moment of silence, just as often as he will blast your eardrums with a roar of anger. Emotionally Tony is a complete mess. His obsession with his sister is obvious, a devotion that Tony seems to only half (if that) understand is sexual in nature. But he also has a slight homoerotic bond with best friend Manny Ray (Steven Bauer – the only actor of Cuban heritage in the film), their closeness and macho-posturing carrying more than a whiff of Top Gun-ish “he protests too much”.

Pacino also invests Tony with strangely sympathetic qualities. Sure he’s a violent and ruthless killer and dedicated criminal, but he’s also got a firm sense of loyalty and certain moral lines he won’t cross. He’s got no time for bullshitters and respects only strength and honesty – watch the scene where he brutally talks over the weasely Omar (F. Murray Abraham – jetting back and forth between shooting this and Amadeus for goodness sake!) during a negotiation with drug lord Sosa – he has no respect or regard for his more politically minded boss, only for straight-talking that makes a deal.

It’s all this that ends up making Tony an anti-hero the viewer sort of ends up liking – even while he dopes himself to the brim with coke and funnels piles of it onto the street (not that we see any of that). Tony is a violent killer, but he’s a sort of honest man, a monster yes but a public one that we enjoy seeing. Tony himself recognises this, calling out a crowd of people in a posh restaurant for treating him as a monster so that they can feel better about themselves (slightly undermined by the fact he’s coked to the eyeballs, incoherent and has brutally ended his marriage a second earlier).

So much is Tony a force of nature that, hilariously, it feels like many of the fans of the film – bling gangsters and wannabe street punks – miss that this film is a brutal satire of the culture of excess and greed. Tony’s life falls apart the more money he gets, his addictions and problems growing as his wealth does. He’s an instinctive, but not wise, man who builds a household of fantastic excess and tasteless ostentation (surely, like Saddam, his taps are gold-plated) but also manages to destroy his business and life in a few months due to his greed, stupidity and self-destructive streak.

The things that made him a high-riser are lost the more Tony surrounds himself with garish status symbols. Inevitable destruction walks hand-in-hand with Tony’s “more is more” attitude. The more he attempts to add class and polish to his life, the more he demonstrates his own lack of both qualities. Also, as he gets more obsessed with pointless status symbols he loses the very skills – honesty, energy, shrewdness – that made him a kingpin in the first place. Instead he becomes a drug-fuelled narcissist, making impulsively stupid decisions and wrecking everything he spent the first half of the film building up. Tony Montana is the face of a certain type of Reagan/Thatcher economics, where private enterprise rolls in and ruthlessly takes and takes, with no regard for the impact on other people and no interest in sustainability.

De Palma captures this pretty well – although he probably ends up making this satire of excess more of a hubristic tragedy. Largely because the film falls so hard for Tony – or rather Pacino – that the fact that Tony is, despite his own moral code, a pretty reprehensible person can be easily lost. Not that de Palma probably cares that much, since his main aim here seems to be to create a hell of a ride. And there are some great set-pieces, and some wonderfully character beats – not least a sequence where Tony seizes control of the empire from weak boss Robert Loggia and sinister corrupt cop Harris Yulin.

The film certainly does that, flying from set-piece to set-piece so swiftly and with such a sense of pace and shark-like momentum, you almost don’t notice that it runs for as long as it does. Every few minutes gives us a scene with stand-out moments of either Pacino grandstanding, shocking violence or both. Scarfaceis a very violent film – everything from chain saws to bullets are used to pull gangster bodies apart – and while it has a sort of moral message (“Excess is bad”) it’s really just an excuse like Cecil B DeMille to make us feel good about ourselves by watching someone pretty bad (but with a few redeeming qualities) dance like a bear for two and a bit hours doing terrible things (entertainingly) before being carved down in a hail of bullets as the devil comes round to collect.