NYPD beat-cop Eddie Dugan (Richard Gere) is one week away from retirement. He plans to move to Connecticut; hopefully the prostitute he’s in love with will come along. Detective Sal Procida (Ethan Hawke) has two kids and two more on the way. The mold in his family’s home is making his wife sick and endangering the lives of their unborn twins.

Hoping to raise enough cash to make a down payment on a new home, Sal has taken to stealing from the drug dealers he’s sworn to take down. Detective Clarence Butler (Don Cheadle) is deep undercover, having infiltrated a gang of dope dealers headed up by Caz (Wesley Snipes), who has become one of Clarence’s closest friends. Clarence is being groomed for a promotion, but the only way he’ll get it is by betraying Caz.      

CRITIQUE

Some movies aren’t cliché at all. Some movies are moderately cliché. Some movies are very cliché. And then there are movies which seem to go out of there to be cliché, working like mad to erase any possible trace of an original idea, thought, plotline, or character that may have tried to sneak in at some point. Brooklyn’s Finest falls into the latter category. If there’s a cop-drama cliché this movie fails to employ, it’s only because said cliché hasn’t been invented yet.

Let’s look at what we’re dealing with here. Gere’s character is one week away from retirement, which may lead you to believe he’s not long for this world. But it’s only good cops who get killed shortly before they pick up their gold watch and head home to the missus. See, Gere’s character isn’t much of a cop, disinterested, doing only the minimum required to scrape by. Fictional cops of such a stripe always look for redemption in their golden years (particularly if they’re given to drink and putting their service piece in their mouth every morning, hoping one day they’ll have the nerve to actually put a round in the chamber), which is exactly what Gere does in the third act.

Like most fictional Irish or Italian cops, Hawke’s character is wracked by Catholic guilt, struggling to come to an understanding of the greater good. He’s convinced himself he’s breaking the law only to provide a better life for his wife and kids, but he still heads to confession on a regular basis, and he’s constantly plying his partners with hypothetical questions, hoping one of them will provide some sort of justification for his actions.

Cheadle’s character is afraid of losing his identity, both as an individual and as a member of the African-American community. He’s sworn to protect the streets from the sort of individuals he’s forced to interact with on a daily basis, but he’s seen the war from their side, watched his racist colleagues harass, denigrate, and assault his new friends. He is, to paraphrase Miami Vice, so deep he doesn’t know which way is up.

You can probably guess exactly where these three storylines will end up. What you likely can’t guess is that all three come to a head on the same night, in the same location. They don’t really converge in any way (aside from Gere bumping into Cheadle as the latter walks out of a convenience store, the characters never cross paths), they just all happen to reach their conclusions at the same time, in the same place. Yeah, the housing project that serves as a setting for all of the climactic action is a hotbed of criminal activity, but to think that all three stories (each of which contains enough suffering and misery for a dozen Shakespearean tragedies, and each of which unfolds at a pace that makes Barry Lyndon look rushed) would reach critical mass simultaneously is a bit much.

I haven’t seen such a coincidence in a cop flick since Denzel dropped Hawke off at the home of the cousin of the girl Hawke had earlier saved from being assaulted, which totally ruined Denzel’s plan to have Hawke bumped off. That little bit of ridiculous plotting occurred, of course, in Training Day, which was also directed by this movie’s helmer, Antoine Fuqua (who from evidence presented here is obviously still miffed about being kicked off American Gangster), who doesn’t seem to have a problem with trite, contrived, lazy plotting (see Shooter for more evidence of this).

Training Day just so happens to be one of this movie’s obvious influences, the others being Clockers (or any other Richard Price story from the past eighteen years), Prince of the City (or any other Sidney Lumet cop drama), David Mamet’s Homicide, The Wire, the novels of Dennis Lehane, the novels of George Pelecanos, the novels of George V. Higgins...

Brooklyn’s Finest was written by Michael C. Martin, and while watching the movie I became convinced “Michael C. Martin” was the codename for a plug-and-print screenwriting program devised by Syd Field. Turned out I was wrong, as Martin is a real person, a former tollbooth clerk who wrote this movie’s script for a screenwriting competition. Martin didn’t win, but he still managed to sell the script for a couple hundred grand. That’s a couple hundred grand for regurgitating ideas and characters borrowed from countless other sources and writing some of the lamest tough-guy dialogue this side of To Live and Die in L.A. (The black characters generally employ two words when referring to one another--one contains six letters, the other twelve letters.) I know a couple hundred grand doesn’t seem like much when some scripts sell for a couple million, but two hundred thousand dollars for a script like this is a little like offering a multi-million recording contract to the members of Mini Kiss. Why the hell would anyone do it?

The movie does offer one surprise: a good performance by Wesley Snipes. Snipes hasn’t been in a theatrical release since Blade: Trinity (I doubt that’s coincidental), which set the tone for the lazy, bored, in-it-for-the-check performances that have fueled the star’s straight-to-video vehicles of the past few years. But he’s damned good here. I suppose you could argue that he’s simply doing a riff on his New Jack City character (imagine if that character had served his time instead of being gunned down and you’ll have some idea of the sort of man Caz is), but it still works.

Aside from Snipes, there are a couple other good points. Cheadle also turns in a very good performance. (If you’re wondering why I’m not mentioning Gere and Hawke, well...) Patrick Murguia photographed the hell out of the movie, giving the visuals a fluidity that often serves to call attention to just how inert the storytelling is. And there is one sequence about midway through that works incredibly well. It also involves intercutting between three simultaneous incidents, which makes it almost as preposterous as the finale, but these incidents take place at different locales, so it is a bit easier to take. There’s an energy, immediacy, and sense of danger to this sequence that’s largely absent from the rest of the movie. It’s a (very) faint sign of a pulse in an otherwise DOA offering.

THE VIDEO

The 2.40:1/1080p transfer--encoded with AVC onto a 50GB disc--is a fantastic one. The dark, rich color palette is delineated perfectly. The image is deep, smooth (even the intentional grit looks great), and pinpoint-detailed. Black levels are very, very strong; shadow detail in the dark scenes (which are numerous) is spot-on. The only flaw: a few vertical surfaces break up in long shots (the sides of buildings in aerial establishing shots being the most notorious culprit).   

THE AUDIO

Lossless audio comes in the form of an uncompressed PCM 5.1 track (which is increasingly rare these days). The movie has a nicely tuned sound design, creating realistic sonic environments for all of the story’s locations. Atmosphere and ambiance are strong, effects completely convincing (there’s a great moment where Hawke chases a perp under an elevated train track). The low end is deep, filling out every component of the mix. The only flaw: some of the hushed dialogue gets lost in the shuffle. A Dolby Digital 5.1 track is also included. English SDH and Spanish subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

The commentary by Antoine Fuqua is okay when focused on the physical production, paint-drying boring when Fuqua switches to simply explaining the onscreen action. 

The following extras are all presented in high-definition:

Chaos & Conflict: The Life of a New York Cop (7 minutes) is a free-form making-of featurette.

Boyz N the Real Hood (6 minutes) covers the shoot’s location work.

An Eye for Detail (7 minutes) looks at Fuqua’s directorial style and on-set methods.

From the MTA to the WGA (5 minutes) offers a fawning look at how Martin went from tollbooth clerk to screenwriter.

Three Cops and a Dealer (8 minutes) contains interviews with Hawke, Cheadle, Snipes, and Gere, with the focus being the actors’ thoughts on their caharacters.  

A compilation of deleted scenes (31 minutes) is actually a mixture of extended scenes, alternate takes, and actual deleted bits (one of which really borrows from Clockers).

The movie’s theatrical trailer (which kills, as it actually got me interested in this thing) is also included.

A second disc contains a digital copy of the movie.

FINAL THOUGHTS