This week brings us Brooklyn’s Finest the latest cop drama from Antoine Fuqua, the man who redefined the cop film with Denzel Washington in Training Day. And in the tradition of late, this film is dark, gritty and mean – just like the streets these guys walk the beat on. The only problem is much like those same streets it’s long and a bit boring in places.
Brooklyn’s Finest tells the story of three New York cops at very different junctures in their lives and careers. Eddie (Richard Gere) has seven days to retirement and wants nothing more than to settle down to the easy life with his prostitute girlfriend. Tango (Don Cheadle) is deep undercover with the local drug dealers lead by the recently released Caz (Wesley Snipes). And Sal (Ethan Hawke) is an honest cop struggling to make ends meet so he can buy his pregnant wife and four children a new house. In the space of a few days, their paths will cross, loyalties will be tested and some of Brooklyn’s Finest will be laid to rest.
When Antoine Fuqua hit the big time with Training Day, it seemed everything he would touch from then out would turn to gold. His follow up to Training Day was the much-underrated but excellent political war thriller Tears of the Sun (Bruce Willis’s last decent role).
He followed that with the critical and commercial bomb that was King Arthur and once the dust settled on that he tried in vain to create an action hero with Mark Wahlberg in the poor man’s Jason Bourne movie Shooter. Now he revisits the ground that made him with a film that for all its style and grit comes off like an amalgam of every cop thriller you’ve seen over the last twenty years with a cast that starred in most of those films.
Solid
It goes without saying that the acting is solid all round, but you would take that as a given considering each of these guys has played the same role in another and better movie. Take Richard Gere from Internal Affairs, Ethan Hawke from Training Day, Wesley Snipes from New Jack City and Don Cheadle from Crash, shake their characters about and you have Brooklyn’s Finest.
Writer Michael C Martins dialogue doesn’t so much crackle with intensity as lumber along like a battered boxer. If the characters aren’t yelling “F**k you†at each other they’re punching each other and scowling. The same can be said for the direction which kind of just follows these guys about à la Training Day, but instead of the hot sun of LA playing its part in the story, we have the dreary setting of Brooklyn New York (again probably intentional but damn is it boring).
And that’s the main problem in a nutshell. Brooklyn’s Finest takes the ideas behind four or five excellent standalone films and tries to work them in to one cohesive picture. Because of this you can’t get behind the characters and even if you do, you find there’s very little to like about them which is either an intentional contradiction of the film’s title or the director is saying there’s not an honest or good cop in Brooklyn. Either way he takes too long to get to the obvious ending by which time you’re done caring and just want it to end.
Andrew Kennedy
