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The movie is no masterpiece, but its commercial demise is a shame. As screenwriter of Training Day and the sadly overlooked Dark Blue, Ayer has tried to nudge the renegade cop formula into more troubling territory, aiming his loose cannons straight into the body politic. Dark Blue featured a seriously unglued performance from Kurt Russell as a racist LAPD cop in the days leading up to the 1992 riots, and in Harsh Times, Bale’s smart and discerning vet returns from overseas so full of war that he becomes a threat to his friends and himself–but a promising candidate for the Office of Homeland Security, which wants to send him down to Colombia to kick ass in the drug war. Unfortunately the marketing apparatus for urban action thrillers doesn’t exactly reward political rumination.
Bauer Martinez managed to strike up a partnership with the recently reconfigured MGM, so Harsh Times opens with the once-prestigious Leo the Lion. But the marketing has been geared mostly to urban Hispanics. A good deal of the story takes place south of the border, where Bale is in love with a poor young woman, and the other two starring players are Freddy Rodriguez (Six Feet Under) as Bale’s hapless buddy and Eva Longoria (Desperate Housewives) as Rodriguez’s fed-up wife. The prickly issue of how to absorb the trauma of our Iraq war veterans–addressed so powerfully in Patricia Foulkrod’s documentary The Ground Truth–gets lost in the shuffle.
