Calling Brooklyn's Finest a merely generic cop drama is tantamount to calling the Titanic a minor boating accident, or Lindsay Lohan's career marginally off-track. This thing is a veritable smorgasbord of cop movie cliches, delivered with blinding levels of hyperseriousness by the hyperseriousest director working today, Antoine Fuqua. Not unlike the accidentally great Training Day, though honestly more like the less-so Tears of the Sun and King Arthur, Fuqua takes a thoroughly hackneyed script (by first-timer Michael C. Martin) and humorlessly, violently trots it out in front of the camera with as much dim lighting, dour music, and stone-faced seriousness as he can wring from the allotted budget. The only thing that saves this picture from the realm of utter dreck are the principal actors, who are way too good to be left suffocating inside this material.
Three seemingly unrelated but guaranteed-to-converge stories make up Brooklyn's Finest. Calling these stories, exactly, is perhaps a bit too generous. These are unoriginal loglines stretched to the point of breaking. One features Don Cheadle as a cop so deep undercover, he doesn't know which side he's on anymore. Then there's Ethan Hawke, who plays a family man and under appreciated narcotics detective who begins plugging drug dealers and informants to steal drug money, which he plans to use to move his family out of the mold-infested house in which they're currently trapped. Lastly, and most hilariously, Richard Gere plays a grizzled 22-year veteran of the police force who is only 7 days away from retirement. The brass wants to have him help train a couple of green recruits in the field, but his disaffected attitude proves a problematic mix with the idealistic youngsters.
Most any other director would look at these synopses and, if not run screaming from this project, at least treat the sheer derivation on display here with an air of humor or irony. Not so with Fuqua, who cakes these plotlines with such a thick coat of overwrought melodrama that you couldn't cut through them with a burning knife.
For their part, the actors try their damnedest to slog their way through this stuff. Cheadle is reliably good as the undercover cop, though he's also given the best cast to work with. Wesley Snipes appears from tax-evasion exile to play Casanova, a longtime associate of Cheadles' undercover who has just gotten out of prison. He hasn't lost a step, and him and Cheadle work well together, middling dialogue notwithstanding. The rest of their crew is made up of vets from HBO's The Wire, who are better than they really need to be for what little they're given to do. Cheadle also has a few decent scenes with Will Patton as his NYPD handler, though they're both drowned out completely when a scenery-chewing Ellen Barkin shows up to bark nonsensically evil things at Cheadle's character.
Hawke's sections are occasionally interesting, though his character isn't. The best scene of his story is the opening scene of the movie, where he sits in a car listening to an informant (played by Vincent D'Onofrio) ramble on endlessly, specifically because Hawke doesn't have to do very much. When he is forced to act, he mostly just sweats, glowers, and shouts, though not always in that order. Lili Taylor is wasted as his suffering wife, as is Brian F. O'Byrne as Hawke's straight-laced partner.
While Hawke's story is merely sort of uninteresting, Richard Gere's attempt at an aging cynical cop is nothing short of tragic. It's not that Gere gives a terrible performance. The real problem is that Gere simply can't project anything that feels even remotely grizzled. He's too smooth, too clean, too pampered-looking to demonstrate a character that's supposed to be road-worn and beaten-down. The movie goes to wild extremes early on to try to emphasize how depressed and antiheroic he is, having him slam large swigs of booze first thing in the morning, followed by a scene of him randomly putting his pistol in his mouth. It doesn't work. Gere is left floundering by his unfortunate miscasting, and by the time he's saddled with an achingly inauthentic relationship with a young prostitute, the whole thing becomes utterly unwatchable.
Eventually these stories waft into one another in an exceptionally half-baked way, but by that point you'll have long-ceased to pay any attention to the proceedings. Brooklyn's Finest suffers from enough script issues already, but Fuqua's gloomy, faux-gritty presentation of the material makes it nothing short of insufferable. There are good actors here, and they are trying to make something, anything fly out of this hodgepodge of a script, but they're ultimately left grasping at air.
Amusingly enough, the makers of TV Carnage are currently working on a project called Cop Movie, in which they will piece together the most cliched scenes of 120 different cop films, in the hopes of creating some kind of original story arc/plot out of them. So, essentially, it'll do what Brooklyn's Finest does, without bothering to hire new actors and refilm all these warmed over scenarios. I'll hedge my bets it'll be a lot more fun to watch, too.
Most any other director would look at these synopses and, if not run screaming from this project, at least treat the sheer derivation on display here with an air of humor or irony. Not so with Fuqua, who cakes these plotlines with such a thick coat of overwrought melodrama that you couldn't cut through them with a burning knife.
For their part, the actors try their damnedest to slog their way through this stuff. Cheadle is reliably good as the undercover cop, though he's also given the best cast to work with. Wesley Snipes appears from tax-evasion exile to play Casanova, a longtime associate of Cheadles' undercover who has just gotten out of prison. He hasn't lost a step, and him and Cheadle work well together, middling dialogue notwithstanding. The rest of their crew is made up of vets from HBO's The Wire, who are better than they really need to be for what little they're given to do. Cheadle also has a few decent scenes with Will Patton as his NYPD handler, though they're both drowned out completely when a scenery-chewing Ellen Barkin shows up to bark nonsensically evil things at Cheadle's character.
Hawke's sections are occasionally interesting, though his character isn't. The best scene of his story is the opening scene of the movie, where he sits in a car listening to an informant (played by Vincent D'Onofrio) ramble on endlessly, specifically because Hawke doesn't have to do very much. When he is forced to act, he mostly just sweats, glowers, and shouts, though not always in that order. Lili Taylor is wasted as his suffering wife, as is Brian F. O'Byrne as Hawke's straight-laced partner.
Eventually these stories waft into one another in an exceptionally half-baked way, but by that point you'll have long-ceased to pay any attention to the proceedings. Brooklyn's Finest suffers from enough script issues already, but Fuqua's gloomy, faux-gritty presentation of the material makes it nothing short of insufferable. There are good actors here, and they are trying to make something, anything fly out of this hodgepodge of a script, but they're ultimately left grasping at air.
Amusingly enough, the makers of TV Carnage are currently working on a project called Cop Movie, in which they will piece together the most cliched scenes of 120 different cop films, in the hopes of creating some kind of original story arc/plot out of them. So, essentially, it'll do what Brooklyn's Finest does, without bothering to hire new actors and refilm all these warmed over scenarios. I'll hedge my bets it'll be a lot more fun to watch, too.
