Brooklyn's Finest

Brooklyn's Finest

Reviewed by Daniel Holloway

March 05, 2010

The stories of the three cops at the center of "Brooklyn's Finest" aren't so much interweaving narratives as they are bullets fired from different angles at the same target. In this case, that target is a Kings County housing project, apparently built so squad cars could be parked there by the dozen. There we find Clarence (Don Cheadle), working undercover as a lieutenant in what is, by movie standards, a fairly small-time criminal operation. Also lurking around is Sal (Ethan Hawke), a narcotics officer in need of cash, who discovers piles of the stuff sitting around in his team's constant raids of the place. Eddie (Richard Gere), a burned-out uniform on the verge of retirement, finds himself in the project's neighborhood daily, though not in its hallways until that bloody, climactic collision.

Director Antoine Fuqua and screenwriter Michael C. Martin, like so many before them, use hardened cops to explore issues of morality and honor while filling the screen with bang-bang action. Unfortunately, they attempt to do this in the wake of David Simon's HBO series "The Wire," which hiked the bar for such stories higher than ever (and whose wonderful Michael K. Williams, as if to reinforce an unfortunate comparison, shows up here as Clarence's chief rival for power within the gang). Fuqua—who covered this territory before in "Training Day"—fails to clear that bar in part because he insists on keeping the tension artificially ratcheted up with lots of tight close-ups, throbbing music, and easy clichés.

Gere suffers the most from the filmmakers' affection for repeating what's been done better elsewhere. In his very first scene, Gere is asked to wake up, turn off his alarm clock, down a gulp of cheap whiskey, insert a gun in his mouth, and pull the trigger. (Spoiler: The chamber is bullet-free.) But Gere is too tanned and coiffed to play a believable loser. Watching him go through these motions, you find yourself wondering why the guy from "An Officer and a Gentleman" is pretending to be a Samuel Fuller character. Cheadle is saddled with a similarly ill-fitting role, sticking out so much from the criminals he runs with that when they wonder aloud who the snitch in their midst is, it seems impossible they wouldn't know. Only Hawke appears to have survived the casting process intact. His corrupt narc sweats greed and desperation in every scene, yet Hawke manages to hang on to the character's humanity throughout. It's a light touch in a movie with far too few of them.

Genre: Drama.
Written by: Michael C. Martin.
Directed by: Antoine Fuqua.
Starring: Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke, Wesley Snipes.

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