Hazing in the hood

Training Day. Denzel! Ethan Hawke! (You know, from that movie where they talk a lot.) What could be better?


Or what could be worse? This is a movie that makes me feel sick while watching it, almost ill. To explain this, I can only point to two other movies that made me feel the same way: the slightly ridiculous Wesley Snipes vehicle New Jack City, and the beyond strange King of New York, starring a catatonic psychopath version of Christopher Walken, among various other circa 1990 Hollywood stars (hello again Wesley, welcome back Larry Fishburne) who exist solely to kill one another in some bizzaro version of New York City--that seemingly consists only of abandoned buildings and fog.

Common elements to these films: Desolate inner city, drugs, ghetto (ahem) trollops, crooked cops, the quest/rise for/to power. Training Day is the same old story, dressed up in a shiny new suit, replete with washed-up 90s rap stars, perhaps the same ones idolizing King of New York and New Jack City.

But sickening? There are plenty of violent action films, but why these specifically?

Is it the nihilism and futility that envelopes the plot and the surroundings? Is it the glorification of the drug trade and violence, on both sides of the "law"?

Maybe. But more so, it's the thematic and philosophical emptiness, which isn't quite nihilism (modern morality play?). No, more like exotic travelogues, ostensibly documenting the darkest sides of modern urban life. We get it: corrupt cops exist, the ghetto is a jungle, something about drugs blah blah blah...

Do these movies have anything else to say, other than stylishly portraying grotesque violence with some treachery thrown in (over drugs, of course)?

Or are they merely a collection of deluded fantasies about manhood and power?