None of this is present on the surface of "Training Day," mind you. What we get instead is a brilliant portrait of a guy who flows down L.A.'s meanest streets oozing with confidence. Harris is a Zen master of copness. He's positively delighted to be a cop, and especially the kind of cop who is always flirting with complete corruption, who spends his days fucking with as many people's heads as possible. Within a couple of hours of their breakfast (which Hoyt pays for, although he didn't order anything), Harris has induced Hoyt to smoke PCP-laced dope and drink both liquor and beer while on duty. (A good narcotics officer, he argues, must know his shit.)

Harris stands by and watches Hoyt gets his butt kicked trying to rescue a teenage girl from a couple of crackhead rapists. "You should have just shot them," he suggests once the melee is over. But Harris is not some strung-out loser without a moral compass, à la Harvey Keitel in "Bad Lieutenant." He sees himself as a Machiavellian prince of the city, serving the cause of greater justice; his impressive arrest record and his decorations speak for themselves, and if the weak are sometimes sacrificed to the strong in the process, that's the way of the world. Dazzled by that wonderful smile and the street-level realpolitik (and maybe by the drugs and booze as well), Hoyt swears loyalty to his new boss. Harris gives him the smile again, with its almost hidden touch of scorn: "My nigga!"

Harris takes his valley-boy "nigga" down a rabbit hole just as disconcerting as the one Fishburne takes Keanu Reeves down in "The Matrix," and the world they find there is equally murky. Harris terrorizes a wheelchair-bound street dealer (Snoop Dogg), provokes a shootout with gang members after using a phony warrant to seize a drug lord's stash of cash, and stages an elaborate sting against an aging surfer type (Scott Glenn) who's one of his oldest friends. Hawke has been stigmatized as representing a certain New Hollywood type -- that is, young, sincere and not awfully bright -- but he's perfectly cast as Hoyt, a man of principle who takes a long time to grasp that his faith in Harris may be misplaced.

Then again, it may not be. "Training Day" isn't just one of the finest cops-and-robbers thrillers of recent years, full of devious twists and gut-grinding tension, but it also steers clear of convenient moral formulas. Harris unquestionably uses Hoyt as a pawn in his elaborate scheme, but he also seems to have a certain affection for the rookie; on balance, he hopes Hoyt plays by his rules and emerges from the urban jungle in one piece. In this universe of apparent anarchy, it becomes clear that even the Bloods of South Central and the Latino gangsters of East L.A. live by their own codes of honor.

In fact, although "Training Day" is a movie of prodigious violence that your grandmother should probably avoid, it's a long way from empty nihilism or sadism. Ayer is above all a writer of melodrama, which means that the good and bad deeds Hoyt and Harris perform will provoke, in the end, an appropriate reaction from the universe. Fuqua's gripping and tightly focused portrait of this urban underworld -- reminiscent, more than anything else, of the early films in the "Dirty Harry" series -- should establish him as one of Hollywood's hottest directors. If there were any justice in the real world, as opposed to the world of melodrama, Washington's masterful performance, with all its passion, wit and grand human irony, would win him another Oscar. But there isn't, so it won't.

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