From “Training Day” to “S.W.A.T.,” writer David Ayer has shown a keen interest in the way law enforcement collides with crooked officers, the former telling a story about a rogue narcotics detective and the latter about a plot to break a criminal out of jail for a $100 million reward.

But with “Harsh Times” – the first script Ayer has also directed – he less interested in the notion of being crooked than the idea of being desperate, and how one war veteran’s desperation leads him down the path to destruction.

Not that “Training Day” and “Harsh Times” don’t look, sound and feel an awful lot alike. Back in 2001, it was Denzel Washington cruising the streets of Los Angeles for a day-long romp of violence and mayhem; here it’s Christian Bale as an honorably discharged veteran rolling down the same streets, looking for a job.

We meet Jim (Bale) first south of the border, lost not in the fog of war but the fog of love, leaving his Spanish-speaking lover to make the drive back home, arriving at the front door of best friend Mike (Freddy Rodriguez). Freddy’s girlfriend (Eva Langoria) is skeptical of the homecoming, wary that Jim will lead her man – recently unemployed and currently looking for a job – astray

Turns out she has got every reason to worry. Together, the boys roll through the city, playing with drugs, beer and girls as if it was their last weekend on Earth. Freddy agrees to party it up with his old friend, letting Jim toss his resumes to the wind for a brief return to the good old days.

There are some good reasons to see “Harsh Times,” but I fear these reasons will be not be appreciated by most moviegoers. This is a dark, bleak, despairing and often horrifically violent film – a two-hour look at the self-destruction of a character we realize is doomed from the outset.

That said, the best thing “Harsh Times” has going for it is Christian Bale who, much as he did with the crazed psychotic killer in “American Psycho,” the anorexic insomniac in “The Machinist” and the obsessed magician in “The Prestige,” bites into his role with all the force of a shark.

He crafts Jim’s tragic downfall with the complexity of a theatrical performance. In the early scenes, he seems more awkward than menacing, struggling simply in readjusting to civilian life. But when he is turned down for a job with the city police, he starts to snap, his plan for a post-war paycheck falling apart in front of his eyes. And when the Department of Homeland Security comes calling, offering him not the chance to work as a domestic law enforcer but as a covert Latin American operative, he realizes he has no choice but to return to the life he thought he had escaped – the life of a cold-blooded soldier.

No wonder he later snaps at Freddy, and even at his lover. Jim’s brain simply cannot allow himself to return to the hells of war.

It’s a fatalistic and pessimistic story, suggesting Jim has been so poisoned by war that he is now immune to any antidote of normal life. And ironically, it is Bale’s performance which makes the film both riveting and unbearable. He so perfectly captures Jim’s rage, fear and isolation that we can’t help but feel for him, not as a sympathetic character but as a tragically lost soul.

What Bale draws out of us is our morbid curiosity, our perverse fascination with what it must be like to endure the atrocities of war, cross over into the blackness, and suddenly find your heart, mind and life teetering at the brink.

True, we don’t like the view from this dark place, but is that a flaw or precisely the point?

by: Steven Snyder steven@zertinet.com, Published 2006-11-11