Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
10/14/07
I often
think of movie genres as being like tuning forks. Most of us have
certain ones that totally match our wavelength, and can rattle off dozens
of movies in that wheelhouse that we loved while others who require convincing
to go along for the ride turned up their noses. When a movie's in
“your” genre, it doesn't need much to get by: half-decent performances,
a plot that doesn't TOTALLY suck, and some of the standard scenes that
all movies like it have. James Grey's We Own the Night is
a movie for people who love cop movies, particularly those that revel in
the mystique of the NYPD, the most celebrated crimefighting fraternity
this side of the Atlantic. I say this not because it's specially
built for those with in-depth knowledge of the genre and its' conventions
but because if all things Police don't float your boat, you're likely to
find the movie as boring, emotionally closed-off and cliched as I did.
NYPD
veteran Burt Grusinsky (Robert Duvall) has two sons: Joseph (Mark
Wahlberg) followed him onto the force, while Bobby (Joaquin Phoenix) has
made a dubious life for himself as a club manager for Russian fur merchant
Marat Buzhayev (Moni Moshonov). Bobby goes by his mother's maiden
name, Green, and keeps the secret of his family from everyone but his girlfriend
Amada (Eva Mendez). But things get dicey when Burt and Joseph approach
Bobby about informing on Marat's nephew Vadim (Alex Veadov), who's dealing
drugs out of the club. Bobby refuses, and so his brother leads a
raid on the club, raising Vadim's ire and leading to an assassination attempt
outside Joseph's home. With his brother in the hospital, Bobby volunteers
to wear a wire for a meeting with Vadim, starting a spiral of events that
can end only in the arrest of those behind the drug ring or the death of
the entire Grusinsky family.
For
a while, We Own the Night (named for the NYPD's 1980's slogan:
although all the music at Bobby's club is from the late 70's and early
80's, the movie is set in 1988) coasts on its' overqualified cast and its'
initial strength in sketching the characters. But once the actual
gears of the plot begin to turn, it's clear that the film is too dour and
its' characters too emotionally repressed to navigate the increasingly
unlikely story in which they find themselves. While his performance
as a died-in-the-wool loser is initially intriguing, once the toll of the
movie's events starts to weigh on Bobby, Phoenix becomes a mumbling blank
slate, giving us no hints as to what he's feeling or how such a character
could possibly decide to not only align himself with the cops but to actually
become one of them. And while I'm not saying that the police don't
allow people to become “provisional” cops without going through the Academy
(I honestly don't know), the movie does nothing to convince me of it.
The final nail of silliness comes when the connection between the Buzhayev
family's various businesses is revealed (hint: I didn't like this
plot point any better in Traffic or License to Kill).
Because they're trapped in a plot rather than driving it, what initially
seems like an interesting dynamic between the characters becomes both passive
and unlikely: Duvall's played so many fiery fathers over the years
that Burt's shrugging “Your Mother was always too easy on you” attitude
is an eye-roller, and the only thing the characters fear more than the
Russian Mafia is actually talking to each other. Joseph keeps threatening
to become interesting when he returns to work traumatized by his attack,
but the movie keeps cutting back to Bobby and his dull, mumbly slog toward
joining the family business. I'm usually a bigger fan of Mendez's
comic work than her dramatic chops, but here she gets the movie's most
interesting character and does good things with the role. Amada is
just a good time girl who probably wouldn't have been with Bobby in six
months no matter what happened to him, but she makes a sincere, big-hearted
effort to roll with the punches as he keeps dragging her into more and
more trouble. Hers is the only performance that made me believe I
was watching a person rather than a type.
There
is one moment when Writer/Director James Grey gets his head out of the
recycling bin and does something genuinely exciting. It comes around
the 2/3 mark when he stages a spectacular car chase in a totally unique
way: it's raining, and the only sounds we hear are those of the screeching,
shooting cars and the relentless drumbeats of the windshield wipers.
Our view almost never leaves the inside of Bobby's car, making everything
from the sliding collateral vehicle damage to the jockeying of different
cars for position seem unpredictable and dangerous in a way it no longer
does when viewing the action from a safe distance. It's a bravura
sequence that threatens to shock the movie back to life. Alas, it's
followed by more plodding and more mumbling.
We
Own the Night does the bare minimum a police thriller has to do to
get by, taking a potentially intriguing family dynamic and grinding it
to dust with inevitability. It's not unwatchable, just consistently
dull even before it gets silly and even its' good cast can't keep it's
head above water. I've seen worse, and for some people, in this genre,
that's good enough. You know who you are. |
