C-

It’s easy to understand why Denzel Washington jumped at the chance to play a charismatic, fast-talking, lip-smacking villain in “Training Day.” Not only is his role as a venal, corrupt Los Angeles cop a flashy, flamboyant star turn, but it must have been a welcome change of pace from all the goody two-shoes and righteous martyrs he’s been portraying over the last decade; he was in grave danger of becoming the new Sidney Poitier. And there’s no denying that Washington is up to the challenge: his Detective Sergeant Alonzo Harris, narcotics officer extraordinaire, is certainly an eye-catching, ear-grabbing creation as he drives about the mean streets, spewing orders and doing dirt.

That doesn’t mean, unfortunately, that the cinematic vehicle the star’s ensconced in is a new, or attractive, model. In fact, the screenplay for “Training Day,” by David Ayer, is a pretty broken-down affair, filled with cliches (buffed up, to be sure, but still awfully hoary) and ultimately doomed by a several bursts of idiocy toward the close that wreck it–exactly what you might expect of the man who previously gave us “U-571” and “The Fast and the Furious.” Ayer’s script provides Washington with some succulent lines to munch on and spew out, but in terms of plot it’s extremely messy and, in the third act, positively absurd. And certainly Antoine Fuqua isn’t the man to transform the material into something better than it is. Known for his commercials and music videos, the director brings the same kinetic rush to the picture that he used in his earlier features “The Replacement Killers” and “Bait,” but the emphasis on style over substance ultimately proves more wearying than exhilarating, and since there’s an essential sameness to the cinematic tricks he employs, they become tiresome and predictable long before the two-hour mark is reached. Rather than concealing the screenplay’s weaknesses, Fuqua’s technique merely throws them into greater relief.

The narrative of “Training Day” unfolds over the space of less than twenty-four hours. Naive, wide-eyed (through suitably bedraggled) police rookie Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) is excited by the prospect of working undercover with the legendary Detective Harris and moving up the promotion ladder by succeeding in his elite narcotics unit, but Harris quickly makes it clear that the kid’s on trial: Hoyt’s got to prove his ability and loyalty quickly in order to keep his spot on the squad. It soon becomes clear, however, that in doing so the younger man will have to compromise his principles and sully his hands in shady doings. Within a matter of hours Harris has implicated the hapless trainee in his own Machiavellian machinations, the ultimate purpose of which isn’t made clear until fairly late in the picture, during a mid-afternoon restaurant meeting between Harris and some equally corrupt departmental higher-ups. From this point the plot spins out of control: to secure funds he needs before the day is out, Harris involves Hoyt in the murder and robbery of a drug dealer (Scott Glenn) whom he’d earlier introduced as a buddy, and then he takes the younger man to the forbidding headquarters of a brutal Hispanic gang. It wouldn’t be fair to reveal too much about what happens next (particularly since the reasons behind things get awfully unclear): suffice it to say that the final act is predicated on a coincidence so palpably ridiculous that one can only groan in disbelief at the contrivance. There then ensues a final confrontation that’s bloody awful in every sense, followed by a laughable moment of gangsta nobility that’s obviously been concocted to pander to a sizeable portion of the urban audience, and capped by a shoot-out that trashes the memory of “Bonnie and Clyde.” The picture has been careening downhill from fairly early in the running-time, but during the last half-hour it goes completely off track.

Throughout the debacle Washington exudes energy, but after initially impressing us, his essentially one-note turn–extravagantly high-pitched as it is–comes to seem a pointless bit of exhibitionism, more a stunt than a performance. By contrast, Hawke is a complete wallflower. His character is at first in awe of Harris, of course, so the actor’s initial diffidence is appropriate; but by the end Hoyt is supposed to have developed into a convincing opponent to the older man, and Hawke proves entirely inadequate to the challenge, remaining a feeble rival who could be slapped aside by a guy like Harris without breaking a sweat. There are other people in the cast, of course, but the movie is basically a two-man show; Glenn, for instance, uses his now-wizened face to good effect, but he’s otherwise a sleepy presence, and even such recognizable figures as Tom Berenger and Snoop Dogg make very little impression. (The seemingly ubiquitous Harris Yulin does stand out, but not to good effect.)

One of the most notable things about “Training Day” is the negligible attention given to women in it. Hoyt has a wife who sends him off hopefully at the beginning of the story, but she disappears after that; Harris has a wife too (at least I think she’s his wife), but he treats her as though she were little better than a hooker (while virtually ignoring the angelic little son he has by her). The only other female of consequence is a young Latina who cuts school and winds up nearly raped. From this is should be clear that Fuqua’s picture is basically a macho exercise, one of those pieces focusing on a face-off between a colorful bully and a Walter Mitty type in which the worm finally turns. It’s an old formula, but one that still has life in it. Unfortunately, though Washington tries hard– maybe too hard–to make his part of the equation work, the preposterously convoluted story he’s saddled with undermines his efforts; and Hawke proves completely incapable of holding up his side of things. By the time its drawn-out finale lurches to a screeching close, “Training Day” has come to feel more like “The Longest Day.”

D

There’s very little happiness in the inaptly-named “Joy Ride,” either for the actors, the filmmakers, or–most of all–the audience. John Dahl’s long-delayed thriller, which has sat on the shelf for a couple of years, turns out to be a numbingly idiotic retread, a half-baked mixture of “Duel” and “The Hitcher” that’s markedly inferior to both those models. It was originally called “Squelch,” a moniker which refers to the Citizens Band radios that are linchpins of the plot; however obscure and unpleasant-sounding, that title is preferable to the present one, because at least it suggested the queasy feeling of being trapped and squeezed that a viewer experiences when confronted by a movie as goofily tawdry as this one.

The set-up is quite simple. Paul Walker, the handsome blond star of “The Fast and the Furious,” plays Lewis Thomas, a California college boy who buys a beat-up car so that he can pick up his home-town friend Venna (Leelee Sobieski) at her Colorado campus and get to know her better as they drive back to New Jersey for the summer. On the way, however, he stops to bail his ne’er-do-well brother Fuller (Steve Zahn) out of a local jail. Unfortunately, Fuller insists on sticking with Lewis, and gets them into serious trouble by persuading his sibling to play a joke on a gruff-voiced trucker who goes by the CB moniker of “Rusty Nail.” Pretending to be a woman, Lewis feigns romantic interest in the guy, and eventually invites him to visit “her” in a motel room actually occupied by a notably nasty fellow-guest. When the latter turns up beaten to a pulp, the boys realize they’ve picked the wrong guy to josh; and things get markedly worse when he decides to pay them back, big-time (as Dick Cheney might say). What follows is a cat-and- mouse game in which not only Lewis and Fuller, but the spunky Venna (as well as a few hapless bystanders), are in increasing danger. It all culminates in a bloody confrontation in which the girl’s life hangs in the balance, and the guys’ too.

The idea of a wacked-out truck driver who menaces a motorist or two is hardly new: Steven Spielberg treated the idea brilliantly in his 1971 ABC telefilm, and Victor Salva got good mileage out of the concept in the first part of the recent “Jeepers Creepers” (though that movie fell apart in the later stages). Eric Red and Robert Harmon dispensed with the truck, but used the notion of a psychotic endangering an unsuspecting traveler with similarly chilling results in their 1986 opus (though “The Hitcher” couldn’t sustain its ambiguous premise for the whole trip). But in “Joy Ride” the effort goes nowhere fast. That’s a pity, because Dahl is a canny craftsman who’s previously worked wonders with pulpy material: “Red Rock West” (1993) and “The Last Seduction” (1994) were skillful exercises in noir atmosphere, and though “Unforgettable” (1996) had a ridiculous premise, he gave it considerable panache. (His 1998 “Rounders” had higher aspirations, which it didn’t entirely fulfill.) But in this case the scenario defeats his best efforts. The script by Clay Tarver and J.J. Abrams is as filled with holes as a pock-marked highway: Exactly how does the mad pursuer learn everything he knows about our heroes? And how in heaven’s name is he even aware that a girl whom he kidnaps to force his prey to do as he wishes happens to be Venna’s roommate? Dahl certainly stages some unsettling scenes–the one in which Lewis and Fuller listen to the arrival of “Rusty Nail” at the motel room next to theirs is genuinely scary, and a sequence at a deserted convenience store raises some goosebumps–but elsewhere the situations are so over-the-top and implausible that it’s impossible for him to maintain even a shred of credibility, or so silly (most notably a sequence in which the boys are compelled to walk into a truck stop nude) that they entirely beak the mood. To make matters worse, just when the contrivance finally lumbers to a stop, it insists on starting up again; there’s one dumb climax after another, and the last–which features Venna trussed up with tape and facing a shotgun blast–is both badly thought-out and ineptly choreographed. (You know a film is in trouble when it places its heroine in such peril–it was a problem in “The Hitcher,” too, though it wasn’t fatal in that case because the picture at least had the courage to see the scene through to the bitter end.) To add insult to injury, a truly stupid twist is tacked on at the close to leave room for a very unlikely sequel. Given the structural weaknesses in the writing, Dahl can’t be blamed overmuch for the fact that this “Ride” comes up short.

The actors, it must be said, don’t rise about the screenplay either. Walker is a good-looking cipher as Lewis, which leaves the job of revving things up almost completely to Zahn, an able farceur whose insistently frenetic style quickly grows wearying; you’re supposed to find Fuller a charming rogue, but Zahn misses the charm. Sobieski is more animated than she was in the recent “The Glass House,” but that only means that she’s not doing an impression of a somnambulist.

“Joy Ride” represents a return to the garish look that marked Dahl’s early pictures (“Rounders” was grittier and more naturalistic), but in this case the effect isn’t amusingly lurid, just cheaply so. Ultimately the picture is a terrible disappointment not merely because it reveals so acutely the limitations of the director’s method, but in the process recalls so many far better flicks. You’d be well advised to watch any of them on video or DVD again instead of wasting your time on this sad wreck of a movie.