Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
3/21/10
It
really is all in the execution: no matter how many times you've seen
something done or how indifferent you might have been to it on those occasions,
under the right circumstances, it can still sing. Brooklyn's Finest,
Antoine Fuqua's return to the dark side of police work he previously explored
in Training Day, brings together a whole lot of things I usually
struggle to tolerate. The aforementioned dark side of the badge,
one of those Crash-inspired “random characters pinballing off each
other” structures, and buckets and buckets of hard-living criminals awash
in their ill-gotten gains get mashed together by debuting screenwriter
Michael C. Martin into a story that starts out interestingly and slowly
but surely got under my skin until I was utterly gripped by the climax.
Strong performances by Richard Gere, Don Cheadle and Ethan Hawke as its
three compromised protagonists go a long way, as does the hardcore determination
with which Fuqua takes a very familiar movie world and fills it with sharp,
dangerous edges.
Three
NYPD officers are at the end of their ropes. Detective Sal Procida
(Ethan Hawke) has a house full of mouths to feed with two more on the way,
and the mold in the walls of that house is making his wife (Lili Taylor)
sick. Desperate to keep up with the bills and close on a new place,
he's taken to picking up extra money whereever he can, stealing from drug
busts and even killing criminals to make off with their loot. Detective
Clarance “Tango” Butler (Don Cheadle) has been undercover far too long,
first in prison and then in the organization of recently released Caz (Wesley
Snipes) with whom Tango now identifies more than his handler (Will Patton)
or the Federal Agent (Ellen Barkin) pulling their strings. Officer
Eddie Dugan (Richard Gere) has just one week left until retirement ends
an underachieving career. As part of a new initiative to get rookie
cops into the highest crime areas, he's asked to be a mentor over that
final week, but all her wants is to get off the force alive and fulfill
his dream of running off with a prostitute (Shannon Kane) he loves.
Their three largely unconnected lives are simmering to a boil, converging
on the same building where, one night, all fates will be decided.
I've
deemed a lot of similar movies (Street Kings
and Pride and Glory come to mind) somewhere
between aggressively OK and the low end of mediocre on this site, and for
a while, Brooklyn's Finest chugs along at a similarly adequate pace
while showing you the lay of its complicated land. But I got slowly
but surely hooked by the conviction with which it presents police work
as a job like any other, filled with politics, low pay and tiny irritations,
amped up by the constant danger and proximity of people doing so much better.
In short, I didn't feel like Sal's desperation, Eddie's numbness and Tango's
divided loyalties were a product of the screenplay but rather a clear and
understandable reaction to the world in which they lived. And as
Martin's script keeps tightening the screws on them, I was gripped by their
moral dilemmas. Brooklyn's Finest understands the sinner,
but still believes that the wages of sin are death: all the movie's
major characters are in a moral crucible, and there's amazing tension in
seeing them try to beat the devil.
In
large part, this is because Fuqua makes such good use of things we usually
see in the movies only for titillation or shock value. The amount
of sex, drugs and violence on display makes it clear that the world in
which these cops live is not a moral one, but the script demands that they
be moral anyway or pay the price. By the climax, the final character's
final stand for his sense of self-worth, the feeling that the forces of
evil are totally insurmountable has grown so palpable there literally seems
to be no hope. That sequence, about which I will say no more, is
the most gripping scene I've witnessed so far this year.
Kuddos
to Martin and Fuqua for their outstanding work, but a movie like this can
never come off without top-shelf performances. The three lead actors
are cast right in their wheelhouse and they deliver. Gere has always
been best as characters who've been hollowed out by life (back to his career-reviving
turn as another beaten man in love with a very different hooker in Pretty
Woman), and he manages the tough feat of coming off as pretty much
useless to the world AND demanding our sympathy. Hawke
played a similarly frantic man in need of ill-gotten money in Before
the Devil Knows You're Dead and here again he's at the top of his game.
Sal is so desperate, he's tossed his moral compass in the trash, and while
we can't approve of what he does, we can certainly feel the walls closing
in on him even as characters like Brian O'Byrne's relentlessly optimistic
fellow cop seem like lunatics to suggest everything will work itself out.
Cheadle excels at characters who see the world too clearly for their own
good, and years undercover have persuaded Tango to affiliate himself with
whatever the most loyal person around wants to do (in this case, run a
drug empire) rather than what's right because his bosses are tools.
Speaking of which, Patton makes a great gladhanding idiot of a supervisor
and Barkin is sensational in her couple scenes as the kind of maneater
who always gets ahead. And what do you know, there's Wesley Snipes
in a major studio release for the first time in years! He's very
good, injecting a world-weariness that probably comes from close to home
into a character who's come out of prison a better man, just not good enough.
Kane is very good in a key late-movie scene where Eddie puts all his cards
on the table and learns for the first time what she really thinks when
he's not paying her, and Taylor again shows off that special knack she
has for seeming like a regular woman brought in off the street to play
herself.
Brooklyn's
Finest stands out from other police thrillers by simply doing what
they all do really, really well. There's no stipulating to the lure
and price of crime here, no dewy-eyed talk of the force as a Band of Brothers.
Just the cold, hard reality of a very hard job and an exceptionally plotted
story about the toll it takes on three men who've tried, at one time or
another, to do it right. If only they made 'em this well more often. |
