I say "supposedly," because unlike Chronicle, Project X or the granddaddy of all contemporary found footage features, The Blair Witch Project, End of Watch doesn't particularly concern itself with keeping its point-of-view consistent. Early on, we're told that the law school-enrolled Taylor is taking a film class as an elective and thus has a small HD camera (plus two smaller lapel cameras) along to document his life on the beat, but Ayer never limits himself to only showing us what's happening through that lens, yanking footage from such sources as internal police car cameras, security videotape and news footage. And then there are extended scenes -- like a tense sequence where Brian and Mike rush into a burning house to save three small children -- that no camera within the movie could possibly record. To his credit, Ayer doesn't try and come up with a convoluted explanation for how we're seeing what we're seeing in these moments. He simply shoots them with the same handheld, you-are-there approach to keep the visual style consistent, trusting that we'll be too caught up in the reality of what's happening in the scene to worry about who is holding the camera.

Over the past decade, Ayer has cornered the market on present-day L.A. cop movies (James Ellroy still seems to have a lock on period pieces about the L.A.P.D.), penning such thrillers as Training Day and Dark Blue and directing the Keanu Reeves-does-Vic-Mackey picture, Street Kings. End of Watch takes place in the same milieu, but its style and storytelling distinguish it from his past work. Where those earlier movies took place in a contained amount of time, this one sprawls out over the course of what seems to be a year (or possibly longer) and has a distinctly episodic structure where the major threat lurks around the edges of the frame for the majority of the runtime, only manifesting itself in full during the climax. Ayer is chasing after what David Simon achieved in so brilliantly in every season of The Wire -- a step-by-step depiction of how small fires can turn erupt into one big conflagration.

At the start of End of Watch, Brian and Mike are just two high-spirited beat cops, hopped up on youthful adrenaline and the swagger that comes with patrolling the streets carrying a badge and a gun. (One gets the feeling that these dudes watched a whole lot of Cops growing up.) Friends since the academy, they're practically brothers-from-other-mothers, playing pranks, cracking wise and swapping relationship advice. Taylor in particular could benefit from his married partner's tutelage, because he's just started seeing a new girl Janet (Anna Kendrick), who he really, really likes. When they're not busy acting like frat boys, they're making a name for themselves on the street through such daring stunts as the aforementioned dash into a burning house and a number of high-profile busts. Unbeknownst to them, several of these arrests, which again happen over the span of several months, involve the members of a ruthless Mexican cartel, which eventually decides a little payback is in order and greenlights a hit on the two officers, right after Brian has gotten hitched to Janet and Mike's wife has given birth to their first baby... two life-altering events that almost always signal your demise in an action movie.

Because the found footage approach means we're embedded with Taylor and Zavala for the duration for the movie, End of Watch hinges on us enjoying our extended ride-along with these guys. Fortunately, Gyllenhaal and Peña are on point from the first scene, playing off each other as if they've been good friends for years and capturing these guys' mixture of charm and cockiness without ever turning obnoxious. I was particularly impressed by Gyllenhaal, who has displayed more personality and charisma in his past two movies (Source Code and this one) than the entirety of his now two-decade career. There's very little artifice to their performances, which can often be a problem in found footage movies and both actors also do a nice job depicting how the qualities that make these guys good cops also sows the seeds for their eventual fall from grace. End of Watch works quite well right up until its last fifteen minutes, when Ayer loses his nerve and backs away from the apocalyptic ending the story is clearly headed towards. The compromised conclusion he comes up with lets a lot of air out of the movie, wounding not only the theme that drives its narrative arc (the price we pay when hubris blinds us to reality) but also the authenticity he and his stars otherwise work so hard to capture. Gyllenhaal and Peña, not to mention their on-screen alter egos, deserve a more resonate fate than they receive here.

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