REVIEWED - HARSH TIMES: The writer of Training Day revisits similar terrain in an unforgiving drama about masculinity and madness, writes Donald Clarke

DAVID Ayer, a film-maker so taken with male themes that he is currently daring to contemplate a remake of The Wild Bunch, wrote the first draft of this gripping, astringent thriller close to a decade ago. Since then, his script for Training Day helped Denzel Washington win an Oscar. The two stories have so much in common - in both a charismatic psychotic leads a more naive partner astray among the grimmer byways of Los Angeles - that one might reasonably wonder why Ayer bothered to resurrect Harsh Times for his directorial debut.

Well, as things have worked out, the new film is superior to its predecessor in virtually every regard. It has a better sense of place. It works harder at explaining why its antihero behaves as he does. And, crucially, it features an even more terrifying performance at its heart.

Christian Bale, whose good looks sometimes distract critics from his prodigious talent, stars as Jim, an unemployed veteran of the Gulf War, desperately seeking a job in law enforcement. He spends his days in crisp suits trying to convince various bullet-headed interviewers that he is only a quarter as unhinged as we know him to be. He spends his nights - and, come to think of it, the rest of his days - driving, boozing, taking drugs and otherwise leading his buddy Mike (Freddy Rodríguez) astray.

This being a film written by a disciple of Peckinpah, the female characters turn out to be long-suffering and Hispanic. Mike's girlfriend (played by Eva Longoria of all people), an attorney, constantly berates him for failing to get a job and for paying too much attention to his dissolute buddy. Jim, meanwhile, is carrying on an affair with a poor girl south of the border.

One can easily imagine Harsh Times being gleefully dissected by undergraduates at a Gender Studies course. Women may be responsible and forward-looking, but they are also lumbered with binary temperaments that allow only benign or hysterical responses to crises. Masculinity, by contrast, is seen as a terrible disease - something from a Cronenberg film, perhaps - that drives its sufferers to ever more appalling acts of depravity.

Bale, whose character hilariously secures a position with the Department of Homeland Security, does a brilliant job of representing the symptoms of this grim complaint. There are schizophrenic qualities to his performance; Jim swings from charmer to thug with terrifying suddenness. But Bale's notable achievement is to keep both warring instincts alive at all times in Jim's troubled aspect.

Here is a character, as wronged as he is wrongful, whose insidious appeal proves disturbingly hard to resist. It is one of the performances of the decade.