Member-only story

Training Day Revisited: Why The Deleted Scenes Should Have Made It To The Final Cut.

Adebayo Adeniran
3 min readAug 29, 2023

Read on…

The second scene. Image via Twitter

Denzel Washington’s Oscar winning film — Training Day — has been re-released to cinemas in the United Kingdom.

Contrary to the heroic and honourable roles to which we had become accustomed with Mr. Washington in Malcolm X, Remember The Titans, The Siege, Cry Freedom, Much Ado About Thing and his huge body of work, Training Day was a complete departure.

Antoine Fuqua, who was a relative unknown at the time, was given the herculean task of directing the extravagantly gifted Washington, in this epic, and he pulls it off.

Nothing about the second scene in which we meet Alonzo Harris in the downtown café, gave us any idea of what was to come.

And what was to come was unlike anything we had seen before.

Over the course of the day, in which Ethan Hawke’s character —Jake Hoyt — was meant to demonstrate his suitability for the plain clothes department, the rookie cop is tested to breaking point.

From smoking crack to stealing drugs from college kids, robbing a drug dealer of a substantial amount of money and party to the killing of a major drug kingpin in south-central LA, Jake Hoyt is put through the ringer.

--

--

Adebayo Adeniran
Adebayo Adeniran

Written by Adebayo Adeniran

A lifelong bibliophile, who seeks to unleash his energy on as many subjects as possible

Responses (1)