A Case of Villainous Overkill

There’s at least one thing that makes you squirm worse than a bad movie: a movie that’s almost great but settles for being two-thirds good.

“Training Day,” which opened nationwide Oct. 5, is the latest example. Most of its pre-release chatter has been about Denzel Washington playing “against type” as a scary, pathologically corrupt LAPD street detective. (The entertainment press, on the whole, is a colony of fruit flies. Am I the only one who remembers how scary Washington was in “A Soldier’s Story,” most of “Glory” and the first act of “Malcolm X”?)

The real surprise isn’t that Washington is terrific at being a bad guy, but that Ethan Hawke matches up equally well as the browbeaten rookie cop learning more from his apprenticeship than he bargained for.

Director Antoine Fuqua proves that when he’s given a good script, which he lacked in “The Replacement Killers” and “Bait,” his technical flamboyance is validated. He and writer David Ayer conjure a Los Angeles that oozes grimy menace and dry-mouth peril at every corner. The up-to-the-minute dialogue pops like Randy Johnson’s fastballs aimed at your head. And Washington’s serpentine rapaciousness gives a fresh charge to the hoary thematic conundrum that pits Following the Rules against Doing What’s Necessary.

But just as “Training Day” looks to become a classic, it turns into a product. (Spoiler alert: If you don’t want to know how the movie ends, skip this paragraph.) When Hawke’s callow rookie fights back toward the end, it isn’t enough for Washington to be merely vanquished or even killed. He has to be beaten up several times, shot in the rear end, beaten up some more, verbally abused by an angry mob, bloodied up some more and, much later, so there’s no misunderstanding, cut to pieces by several automatic weapons. “What?” I thought. “No one wanted to kick his head off his body?”

This is an all-too-familiar ritual for post-1980s thrillers that I call Killing the Bad Guys to Death. It’s like the story of the mobsters who shoot a hated rival after torturing him to within an inch of his life. Apparently these killers hate the guy so much that, months later, one of them seriously suggests digging up his body so they can “do” him again.

Those who love action movies sanctify overreaching climactic blood lust for its quick-and-dirty gratification. At times, notably in the “Lethal Weapon” series, this relentless bludgeoning is administered with a Toontown smirk. But such broad winking at the audience can wear out its welcome over the long haul, and the wretched excesses become no more justified than they are in movies that at least look as if they know better.

Take “Ransom,” Ron Howard’s 1996 thriller about an airline mogul (Mel Gibson) whose son is kidnapped by a motley gang led by yet another scary rogue cop (Gary Sinise).

Howard, working near his peak with a zesty, ingenious Richard Price script and a first-rate cast, spends most of the movie making you question your sympathies with Gibson’s hubris-ridden character. (It’s clear that by taking unnecessary risks, he’s as cavalier with his son’s life as the kidnappers.) Movies that take such chances refresh their genres and their filmmakers’ reputations.

But at the end, when Gibson and Sinise finally go mano a mano , the Kill the Bad Guy to Death syndrome kicks in. Another smart, tight thriller goes slack and dumb, delivering an overwrought pursuit-and-fistfight sequence with nothing at stake except to make audiences clap at the end for a character who doesn’t deserve the applause. Some might argue that such ambiguity was the point, but I doubt it. Hollywood sees ambiguity as pollen, something to be medicated against, if not purged from the senses.

I understand the primal need for movies to stomp, mash and grind evil to dust. But when thrillers with deeper colors and thicker textures are transformed into Itchy and Scratchy cartoons, I feel cheated and patronized.

It isn’t always necessary to Kill Evil to Death to fulfill your basic expectations for thrillers, and it’s still possible to find such relative restraint at work.

In fact, since the Sept. 11 attacks, there has been consensus that such excessive, gratuitous stomping may be on its way out of the multiplex. After all, the release of “Training Day” was delayed at least a week because of sensitivity to the attacks.

But somehow, I suspect while hoping I’m wrong that the blood lust may be more stirred up and simmering than ever, seeking nourishment from noisy, overcooked movie denouements that do all but beat up dead bad guys five times over.

Compared with the uncertainties of what we’re constantly told is a whole new world, noisy kicks found in dark rooms smelling like popcorn will always feel to many like a warm bath. OK for the nerves, but what about the soul?

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Gene Seymour is a film critic for Newsday, a Tribune company.