Entertainment

LAPD drama worth a ‘Watch’

Has any police department in the country been portrayed in a more consistently negative way than Hollywood’s hometown cops, the LAPD?

Woody Harrelson’s sociopathic officer in last year’s “Rampart’’ is just one of the recent countless examples. There was even a documentary that mocked the LAPD’s motto, “To Serve and Protect,’’ because it’s long been in quotation marks on the side of patrol cars.

That slogan is taken very seriously by the heroic — if hardly straight-arrow — heroes in “End of Watch,” vividly written and directed by David Ayer, who depicted the darker side of the LAPD in his script for “Training Day.’’

Brian (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike (Michael Pena) are a pair of street-smart hot shots, longtime partners newly assigned to patrolling one of the scariest precincts of LA’s South Central.

It’s a place where the most innocent-seeming call carries the possibility of sudden death — as we see in the adrenaline-pumping, high-speed chase that opens the film.

Brian is taking a filmmaking class, so he carries a camcorder everywhere and attaches micro-cameras to his and Mike’s shirts — much to the annoyance of fellow officers who remember the Rodney King case.

Ayer employs the overused shaky-cam/found-footage format to breathe new life and vitality to the familiar buddy-cop genre — think TV’s “Cops’’ with a pair of very good actors behind the wheel. But cutting back and forth between that and more traditional camera work is distracting.

A scene where Brian and Mike drag a kid out of a burning building — rather than waiting for the fire department to show up — is about as exciting and harrowing as anything I’ve seen on a movie screen this year.

The guys’ fearlessness earns the respect of even a jaded veteran (David Harbour) who resents their high spirits. But it also puts them in the cross hairs of a drug cartel that other LAPD colleagues have warned them not to mess with.

This especially alarms Brian’s girlfriend (Anna Kendrick) and Mike’s pregnant wife (Natalie Martinez) who never know whether their guys will survive their often brutally violent shifts.

America Ferrara (“Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants’’) turns in an image-changing role as a tough lesbian officer who develops a grudging admiration for our heroes.

“End of Watch’’ is not a perfect movie. It begins with a groan-worthy slogan (“Once upon a time in South Central . . .”) and its depiction of Hispanics — including, to some degree, Mike — tends toward stereotype at times.

Gyllenhaal and Pena have great chemistry together, though, in their best performances to date. A memorable scene where the officers they play have to decide in a split second whether to kill a sadistic perp vividly puts you right into their very difficult jobs.