Brooklyn's Finest
R (bloody violence, strong sexuality, nudity, drug use, pervasive strong language); 130 min.
A crowded cast of some of the finest actors in cinema can't save the gimmicky, episodic, hit-or-miss script in Brooklyn's Finest, Antoine Fuqua's latest attempt to relive the glories of Training Day.
Writer Michael C. Martin of TV's Sleeper Cell delivers great two-handed scenes, dialogue-driven confrontations and simple, everyday-life conversations interspersed with random moments of melodramatic hooey.
Richard Gere plays a drunken burnout case with seven days to go until retirement, an unpopular loner whose résumé would feature the word "undistinguished." He's in love with a prostitute half his age, and he keeps his gun empty -- his way of delaying a suicide attempt. He's saddled with assorted rookies he's supposed to show the ropes to on his last days on the job.
Don Cheadle is on his game as an undercover officer whose years hanging with drug dealers have cost him his marriage. He desperately wants a promotion, but will he sell out a childhood pal (Wesley Snipes, terrific) to get it?
And Ethan Hawke is an overwhelmed Catholic detective with too many kids, two more on the way, a wife made sick by the mold in their home and little hope of raising the cash to move. He has made the fateful decision to shoot and rob drug dealers to save his family.
The movie's tone is set in a talky, thoughtful and shocking opening -- Hawke and a snitch (Vincent D'Onofrio, perfect) chatting about right and wrong and "righter and wronger."
But for every tasty moment, there's another that is so comically over-the-top, so silly and arch, that the movie stops dead in its tracks. And it goes on and on -- over two hours of violence, raunchy sex and streetwise banter to get us to the moment when these three story threads connect.
You can see why the actors were drawn to this -- good characters, nice monologues, a few explosive scenes. But in keeping all of them happy and still making room for his own excesses, Fuqua loses any sense of pacing. He tells us where we're going, but is so in love with even the scenes that don't advance the story that he can't bear to take us there. Not quickly, anyway.
