Jake Gyllenhaal shaves his head, Michael Pena bites the bullet, and writer-director David Ayer does what he’s been doing for years, delivering gritty tales about the ‘thin blue line that separates the prey from the predator’ on the posy-strewn paths of South-Central Los Angeles.

End Of Watch employs a pseudo-documentary style that amps up the action scenes, but ultimately, riding along Officers Taylor  (Gyllenhaal), and Zavala (Pena) is a bit of a drag.

Having grown up on the streets of South Central Los Angeles, Ayer has developed through relationships with both policemen and gangsters what he calls the ‘I-can-write-about-cops’ gene, as evidenced in his Oscar-winning Training Day and others in the genre like Street Kings and Dark Blue.

What is there to watch in Gyllenhaal’s latest?

With End Of Watch, Ayer tuns his lens on familiar territory capturing the on-duty hours of two patrol cops.

Shot in hyper-realistic style, he uses surveillance cameras, lipstick-cams, dash-cams and hand held cameras under the pretense that Taylor is studying filmmaking on the side and is recording his patrol as part of a project. Not that it couldn’t happen, but it sounds like something you’d see in a movie.

And Jake Gyllenhaal looks like someone you’d see in a movie — which is ironic considering his presence belies the elaborate low-budget/ripped-from-reality look Ayers so diligently affects.

What good is convincing us it’s real if you put a famous movie star front and center? The answer is the movie star draws the financing, and without him the movie doesn’t get made.

On patrol day after day, events unroll with the bare semblance of a plot as Taylor and Zavala cruise around talking about girlfriends, wives, work and just about everything else.

The two actors affect an easy rapport with the rhythms and structures of real conversation. While it feels extemporaneous, according to Ayer the dialogue in the movie is delivered as written with minimal ad-libbing.

The guys soon run afoul of a crime lord named Big Evil who, when asked why he’s called Big Evil, responds with the movie’s best line – “Because my evil… is big.” It’s a sentence that says practically nothing but still says it all.

Evil is tied to the Sinaloa cartel, one of Mexico’s deadliest, and it’s not long before Taylor and Zavala stumble into a hornet’s nest beyond any hope of escape.

While Ayer and his cast demonstrate a thorough understanding of their subject, and their movie features realistic violence and casual callousness, End Of Watch doesn’t really go anywhere.

It’s essentially hanging out with a pair of blunt and dimwitted cops who curse a lot and occasionally have fights, car chases and shootouts – after awhile it loses its charm.

Anna Kendrick drops in for a couple of scenes as Taylor’s girlfriend as if to remind us that he is not, in fact, married to Zavala in the movie. And America Ferrera has a cameo as a fellow cop, but if you blink you’ll miss her.

Gyllenhaal and Pena did five months of preparation for the shoot – ride-alongs with cops, fight training in an Echo Park gym, weapons work on the firing range – and it all appears authentic on the big screen.

But with sketched-in characters and thematic elements that tell us little more than “it’s tough out there on the streets,” End Of Watch is dismissible as a tonally unique but otherwise forgettable cop movie.

–review by Jordan Riefe

It was the ultimate life altering preparation for the new cop thriller End of Watch.

“I had no idea what to expect when I went on the first ride along,” the film’s star Jake Gyllenhaal told Celebuzz in an interview to promote his upcoming action drama film about two police officers from the Los Angeles Police Department who come upon a startling discovery, making them the targets of a drug cartel.

“I didn’t know what I would encounter.”

What the 31-year-old uncovered on his first night out on the streets with the LAPD — a graveyard shift — changed his perspective forever. It was a true-life horror story.’

What happened?

“It was a gang shooting,” Gyllenhaal, who starred in Brokeback Mountain, added.

“It was obviously drug related. One gang member was walking down the street and another one was pulling out of his car and it was having to do with some issues between two different sects of a gang.”

Gyllenhaal and his costar, Michael Pena, 36, spent five months rehearsing and researching for their roles, often accompanying police on ride-alongs in a bid to give them unique insight into Los Angeles’ underbelly and the thin blue line that exists between mayhem — and the rest of socierty.

“Of course it was scary, but it was also thrilling and also really life affirming,” Gyllenhaal added, during the interview at Toronto International Film Festival.

“It changed my perspective on my life and my perspective on my work.”

The gritty new police drama – End of Watch hits theaters on Sept. 21 – was shot documentary style on the streets of Los Angeles.

In the movie’s climactic sequence, Pena and Gyllenhaal are chasing down a perpetrator when he pulls to the curb and flees on foot. In the driver’s seat, Pena wanted the wheels to squeal as they skidded to a stop, but wound up crashing into the parked vehicle.

“I stopped early — six seconds of screeching — crashed into the car,” Pena told Celebuzz. “We got out and finished the scene. It’s in the movie.”

Gyllenhaal, who executive produced End of Watch with a mini-budget of $7 million, found several things flashing through his head as the car careened out of control.

“We only have one car, we only have one stunt car, we only have on dash-cam shot-car, it’s going to be hours before we can fix the hood of the car,” sighed Gyllenhaal, when he chatted to Celebuzz.

“All of these things went through my mind as we were sliding into the other vehicle.”

“The car started bumping against the back of the van and then started rolling on the opposite side of the street,” said Gyllenhaal.

“Ultimately, as dangerous as it was, it was pretty fun, too.”