David Ayer had already carved out a niche for crafting hard-hitting and street-level crime stories as a writer long before he made his feature-length directorial debut on Harsh Times, so there were no prizes for guessing which genre his first film from behind the camera fell into.
Sticking to what he knows best, the Training Day scribe crafted a hard-boiled thriller that focused on the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles, and the damage it can do to its inhabitants. Led by an incendiary performance from Christian Bale, Harsh Times may not have taken off at the box office or left critics blown away, but it’s developed a reputation as something of an unsung cult favorite.
Reinforcing that notion, the sun-baked descent into the depths of rejection has returned with a vengeance to carve a trail of destruction through the Prime Video most-watched rankings, per FlixPatrol. Bale’s Gulf War veteran comes home from conflict and believes it’s his destiny to protect the streets of his city as a police officer, but fate has other plans.
After he gets rejected by the LAPD and offered a position with the Department of Homeland Security instead, he recruits Freddy Rodriguez’s unemployed best buddy Mike to take matters into their own hands and blaze a trail of nihilistic destruction throughout the city. Unrelentingly bleak and seriously stone-faced, Harsh Times may not be for everyone, but it’s worth a watch if Ayer’s particular set of skills are to your liking.
If not, then you find yourself left feeling as cold and detached as Bale’s furious protagonist, albeit without the rampage.
Published: Apr 13, 2023 02:22 am