In HARSH TIMES Christian Bale and Freddy Rodriguez troll the seamiest streets of Los Angeles looking for trouble and usually finding it. If this sounds very much like writer David Ayer’s earlier screenplay, TRAINING DAY, that’s because it is. In fact, it plays like the bits and pieces that didn’t make the final edit of that earlier script. So much so that as Bale and Rodriguez make the rounds, it comes as an actual surprise that they don’t run into the same low- and middle-life characters that Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke encountered. The problem, aside from the lack of originality, is that while TRAINING DAY may have rambled, it had an identifiable story arc. HARSH TIMES is just spinning its wheels.
Like TRAINING DAY, this effort offers a meaty role for its lead. During the course of its seemingly interminable running time, Bale acquits himself nicely as the ex-military guy with bad nightmares and an even worse attitude. He believably runs the gamut from tender lover, to amoral homeboy, to straight-arrow military type, and all of them a psycho with a dream. That would be to join the Los Angeles police force. That dream doesn’t work out, but another, even more frightening one opens up that calls for him to make a sacrifice, and not just the unspeakable, and apparently unfilmable, move he makes on his person with a turkey-baster in order to pass a drug test.
The secondary story involves Rodriguez’s character, a basically nice guy who blows off looking for a job, which would please his lawyer wife (Eva Longoria), to cruise around with Bale, knocking back malt liquor, cigarettes, and a few activities that qualify as felonies. That’s pretty much the whole movie. Bale carouses, pines for his woman in Mexico who can’t cross the border with him until he gets a job, and has a few flashbacks to the very, very bad things he did in Afghanistan. Adding spice to this is Ayer’s flat direction and his take on the female of the species. They are either pliant playthings or bitchy obstacles. Sometimes they are both. Granted the audience is supposed to be seeing the world through the eyes of these two guys, but by giving that audience no characters with which to identify, or for which to root, or, and this may be a stretch, by which to be entertained, it makes for a wasteland of effort up there on the big screen. The best on offer is a quirky Homeland Security honcho (J.K. Simmons of OZ and the Law & Order franchise), who grooves on Bale’s peculiar vibe and keeps a desk in the agency’s men’s room.
HARSH TIMES swims through a fog of testosterone punctuated with infinite variations on the pronunciation of the words “dude” and “dawg” such that those words along with a hail of the F-word, make up the bulk of the dialogue. Its greatest accomplishment may very well be teasing out so many different ways of saying those three words. Somewhere, a linguist will quiver with delight at the prospect of dissecting the nuance of each inflection in each verbalizing of these words. More power to them for preventing this from being a complete waste of everyone’s time.
Your Thoughts?