Training Day (2017)

The combination of solid plotting, decent dialogue, breathless editing and solid performances makes the series work.

While viewers might be hesitant to watch Training Day, they might find themselves wanting to give it a chance because of Paxton. They probably should. They just shouldn’t expect it to remind them of the movie.

Viewers could do worse than tuning in every week to see Frank troll department heads about a lack of donuts in staff meetings, but Training Day doesn’t show enough in three episodes to merit its origins.

Bruckheimer assembly-line sausage stuffed with plenty of hooey and violence--but the leads are plenty appealing.

Smoothing off some of the rogue cop’s edges, ironically, makes Paxton’s acting job more difficult. He has keep reminding us that he’s contemptuous of many law enforcement standards while at the same time throwing out hints he still harbors some deep and real humanity.Roarke sometimes lurches a little from this balancing act, at least in the early going, and that can throw off other characters as well.

The question with any movie turned into a series is whether the concept has the legs to last on an episodic basis. Evaluating the first few patrols, that's the key test that Training Day doesn't pass.

Paxton steals just about every scene he’s in.

Truth is, Training Day could stand being a little uglier. [30 Jan - 12 Feb 2017, p.19]

A toothless gruel of police-procedural cliches and focus-grouped mediocrity...This show ain't got s--- on King Kong. [Feb 3/10 2017, p.101]

Mr. Paxton gets to deliver the best lines and blow the most stuff up. Wry and swaggering, he’s the only one having any fun here, which pushes the audience to Frank’s side. In this formulaic “cop who won’t play by the book” setup, the book doesn’t stand a chance.

Though nothing in Training Day, including the partnership of Frank and Kyle, is quite as simple as it first seems, what I saw in three episodes wasn't intriguing enough to make me crave a fourth, or to understand exactly why CBS thought now was the time to glorify the kind of police officer who thinks laws are for other people.

The problem with "Training Day" as a series is that it wants to be reassuringly safe and disturbingly dangerous at the same time, and this duality proves its undoing. The strain of this balancing act is felt in the unconvincing, sometimes cartoonish dialogue, direction and performances.

When it isn't irritatingly imitative, [it's] hopelessly stupid.

This Training Day is steeped in clichés so embarrassingly retrograde that it suggests John McTiernan's Last Action Hero played with a straight face.

TThe writing is stilted, with every other sentence from Rourke's mouth a ready-made movie poster tagline.

Without the necessary amounts of terror and depravity--remember how terrified Ethan Hawke’s Jake Hoyt was of Washington’s sociopathic Harris?--all that’s left is a good actor (Paxton) trying to create something meaningful out of the usual cop show cliches.

Perhaps the intervening episodes will make him more legitimately and compellingly nefarious or will reinforce that Kyle is an active participant in this story. Nothing in the three episodes I was provided makes me want to bother finding out.

A violent, virile and often vile extension of the 2001 film that won Denzel Washington a Best Actor Oscar.

It doesn’t work.

Training Day veers toward the funny bone when it should be going for the jugular. Paxton acts in the pilot as if he’s in a remake of “The Dukes of Hazzard” and he’s playing Cooter. He tones it down in future episodes, but he’s never menacing or scary or even ambiguous.

There’s simply no evidence that any care or passion was put into Training Day from what’s been put on the screen.

Given the current political climate, regressive rubbish like this lands on screens with a gracelessly leaden bellyflop.

Paxton is hemmed in by lousy dialogue and broadcast-network-predictable plot lines.

To characterize the lines flying out of the cast as sophomoric doesn’t cover it. It’s so astounding that some scenes nearly careen into comedy.

It is too bad, and you--all of us, really, including Bill Paxton--deserve better.