Review of Brooklyn's Finest (2010) by Robert B — 28 Mar 2012

Brooklyn's Finest (Antoine Fuqua, 2009).

After making a couple of not-widely-seen-but-critically-acclaimed thrillers, Antoine Fuqua stunned the world in 2001 with Training Day, a tense, tight, completely solid thriller that won Denzel Washington a slew of Best Actor awards, including the Academy's. Fuqua had been Washington's choice to direct, and it looked like Washington had been right; the world was Fuqua's oyster. Then, in quick succession, came Tears of the Sun (forgettable) and King Arthur (are you kidding me?). Four years later, Shooter, which I have been told is actually a very good movie; like almost everyone else, I haven't seen it. Given that track record, the idea of doing Training Day 2 must have haunted Fuqua daily. Enter Sleeper Cell writer Michael Martin, who had a script that begs every possible comparison with Training Day, albeit deconstructed-in the same way that you can go to a swanky restaurant and order deconstructed cheesecake and get a smear of cream cheese, a glass of milk, a vanilla bean, and a graham cracker, all artfully arranged on a plate five times the size it needs to be. Which, now that I think about it, is a fantastic way to describe Brooklyn's Finest. And to put the cherry on top of the deconstructed cheesecake, Fuqua returned to the well, brought Jake Hoyt back, and moved him across the country.

Jake Hoyt 2's name is Sal, and he is of course played by Ethan Hawke. He's trying to keep his head above water on a cop's salary in Brooklyn. Not an easy thing to do; some would say impossible, if you're an honest cop. And there are all too many opportunities to become corrupt in his day-to-day existence. Then there are the older, more experienced, guys who kind of act as the angel and the devil balancing out Sal's neutral path: Eddie (Richard Gere), a straight shooter a few days from retirement who finds himself obsessed with a missing young woman, and Tango (Don Cheadle), a guy who's been undercover so long he's starting to identify with the criminals-and who a shady FBI agent (Ellen Barkin) wants to send back in to inform on, and possibly kill, Tango's childhood friend Caz (Wesley Snipes). The three stories run in parallel (and as far as we know, these guys do not know each other), all converging on a single point in time and space.

If that cast list, save Cheadle and (arguably) Gere, sounds like a who's-who of nineties movie stars whom you've been wondering about the status of for the last ten years, let me also mention Will Patton (whose career was killed by The Mothman Prophecies, which almost destroyed Gere's as well), Lili Taylor (the execrable 1999 remake of The Haunting), and Michael Kennneth Williams (Bringing Out the Dead). There is a lot of talent in this movie, though it never quite coheres the way it should. This is a function of the movie's pace, which in the metaphor above is the five-times-too-big plate; the movie stretches almost two hours and fifteen minutes. While this can be done, and done well (viz. Army of Shadows elsewhere this ish), it's not here. Fuqua and/or Martin never seems quite sure what to do with all that space, so instead of utilizing it wisely, we get five-minute scenes to illuminate a single character point that could have been illustrated as easily, and as richly (while still avoiding emotional shortcuts), in a single minute.

Somewhere inside this movie is a brilliant, award-winning thriller waiting to burst free. Brooklyn's Finest is not it, though on the upside you get to watch a lot of very good actors, some of whom you may not have seen for years, do what they do best. **.