Denzel Washington claims he has no apologies about his role in Training Day. But perhaps he should.

Antoine Fuqua (The Replacement Killers) directed this new movie, which stars Washington as Alfonzo Harris, a 13-year veteran narcotics officer for the Los Angeles Police Department, and Ethan Hawke as Jake, a newlywed with an infant child and a burning desire to work as a detective.

In order to become a detective, he decides to work as a narcotics officer, but first he must prove to Alfonzo that he has what it takes to work in the curious world of undercover narcotics investigations. He has one day to do it.

The office they are working in is a slick, black Monte Carlo, and Los Angeles is their territory. Both of them have sworn to “protect and serve” their communities, but their boundaries in doing so are unclear. No matter what happens, Alfonzo has the police department on his side, and that gives him the confidence he needs to test the line between legality and corruption.

He has developed his own sense of justice that involves developing a core of loyal informants that will then be absolved from their crimes and using all means necessary to cover-up his mistakes. He often uses a wolf-sheep description to show Jake how the inner city must be treated. The residents of the inner city are wolves, and if the police are not wolves too, the security of the city is threatened.

Jake comes from a different place. His philosophy is that police officers must follow the rules of law, no matter what the circumstance.

He is not interested in gaining loyalties of gang members, even if that makes it harder for him to gain information.

He treats his friends as friends and the rest of the people as they are, never putting up a front to trick people.

The problem, Alfonzo points out, is that his job is, first and foremost, to protect and serve.

Jake struggles with an internal conflict of whether to abandon his previous philosophy and become a wolf or to hold strong to his philosophy, even though it makes his job more dangerous and difficult.

To make things more complicated, Jake’s main goal is to be a detective, and in order to do that he must somehow befriend Alfonzo during the course of the day.

The conflicting notions of justice should make it easy for the audience to choose which side they agree with, but the characters complicate things. Washington is typically the good guy in movies, the one that the audience naturally sides with. The underlying theme in this movie: what force is necessary and right to take to protect and serve the people in your territory? Alfonzo has answered that question for himself, but it is right?

One of the biggest steps this movie could have taken was to break down some of the stereotypes associated with the different racial and ethnic groups, but in each scenario in the movie those stereotypes were only backed up. African-Americans were shown in poor housing situations.

Latinos were shown as family ori Whites, in the movie, are shown in nice clothes and in nice homes or restaurants. The feelings that stem from these scenes nearly define white-collar crime as under the table operations.

The diversity in the movie is strong, but a bit of diversity in stereotypes would have given the audience a fresh taste of something new.

As a standard for cops and robbers movies, this movie is something new. It retains the idea of “good prevailing over evil,” but the characters and their shortcomings separate the movie from earlier versions of cops and robbers.