Nothing Fine about Brooklyn’s Finest
If ever a movie could convince viewers that just the very idea of becoming a police officer is the absolute one they’d ever had than Brooklyn’s Finest is that movie. Antoine Fuqua’s (Training Day) epic NYPD saga is a depressingly cliché headache-inducing bore that constantly beats its audience over the head in mock self-importance. This is the kind of film that screams at those sitting in the theater when a quietly stern whisper would get the point across more effectively, its final moments so melodramatically operatic I would have found them silly had they not been so annoyingly pompous.
Don Cheadle and Wesley Snipes in Overture Films' Brooklyn's Finest
All of which is kind of sad because the actors at the heart of all three of Fuqua and freshman screenwriter Michael C. Martin’s interconnected stories invest themselves body and soul into the proceedings. Don Cheadle oozes painful heartbreak as an undercover operative longing to call it quits and yearning for the comfort of a desk, Richard Gere takes the familiar saga of a burnt out beat cop on the edge of a retirement and somehow makes him poignantly touching and Ethan Hawke is all jitters and hyperactive nerves as a veteran rampart drug enforcement detective struggling with how best to provide for his ever-growing family.
Best of all is Wesley Snipes portraying a hardened inner city drug lord freshly released from prison who realizes from his time behind bars this life is no longer for him. His relationship with Cheadle, while not remotely original, is the most honestly depicted in the entire film. I could feel the bonds of brotherhood between these two, their connection forged through a life and death scenario we only learn about in brief snippets of dialogue that cackle with tactile truth. Snipes, an underrated actor who has been toiling in straight-to-DVD obscurity for almost a decade, bats this one out of the park, and here’s hoping his strong showing here will lead to better roles for stronger filmmakers sometime in the near future.
I just wish their collective efforts were worthy of all the fuss. The whole thing moves with a sluggish solemnity that had me noticeably squirming in my seat, Marcelo Zarvos’ (Sin Nombre) loudly overbearing score thundering every one of Fuqua’s points home like they were Zeus’ lightning bolts slamming into my gut. This is a movie that treats its characters as if they were all doggedly insistent on walking head-first into an open grave, even acts of spectacular heroism treated with such little respect sitting there observing it is like being punched in the face while the person doing it just stands there and snickers.
Martin’s screenplay revels in so many crime story clichés I got the feeling after awhile that he must have felt like he was inventing them while he was writing. But shows like HBO’s “The Wire” and “Oz” spent a lot of time in these same back alleys and street corners and did so much more eloquently, while a single rerun of an episode “Homicide: Life on the Street” carries more majesty and weight, and rings with one heck of a lot more truthfulness, than any of the frustratingly banal 133-minutes of this movie do.
Am I being too harsh? The film does look sensational after all, beautifully shot by Patrick Murguia (Beyond the Sky) and edited with a solemn seamlessness by Barbara Tulliver (Redbelt). Fuqua has also assembled a cadre of veteran character actors like Vincent D'Onofrio, Ellen Barkin, Will Patton and Lili Taylor (just to name four) who each have moments crackling with memorable electricity. Individual scenes, like ones between Hawke and D'Onofrio right at the beginning or between Gere and Shannon Kane during the last third, are moving almost beyond words, each showcasing a simple honesty the rest sadly lacks.
Walking out of the theatre I felt pummeled, Fuqua going out of his way to give me the bumps and bruises of a prizefighter way best their prime who climbed back into the ring for all the wrong reasons. The movie showed me nothing I hadn’t seen before and did it in a way that made me unhappy to be sitting there watching it. In short, for all the talent involved nothing about Brooklyn’s Finest made me feel remotely fine, my only happy thought the one I had when I got home and realized I would never have to sit through it ever again.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
