Brooklyn’s Finest

Training Day. Lethal Weapon 1&2. Traffic. L.A. Confidential. Dirty Harry. Rush. Donnie Brasco. Dark Blue. Se7en. Sea of Love. The Departed. Cop Land. Heat. Blow. Similar themes, all much much better than this.

Brooklyn’s Finest stars the utterly brilliant Don Cheadle as an undercover cop at the end of his rope, Richard Gere as a prostitute humping beat cop with 7 days to retirement, and Ethan Hawke as a cash strapped detective stealing money to move his family out of the shithole house that is making his pregnant wife sick. Throw in Wesley Snipes as drug dealing bad ass Cazanova something or other, a police force in crisis and a neighbourhood coming apart at the seams and kablammo. You’ve got yourself an assload of conflict.

Cheadle is conflicted because he has been so deep undercover for so long he is starting to see the other side of things. He has grown to care about Cazanova and it’s starting to stir his protective instincts. Will Patton is his superior officer and he pleads with him for a way out, but popping Caz would be a major high profile arrest for the NYPD so he’s content to let Cheadle twist in the wind. Enter Ellen Barkin, who sounds like she’s been deep throating the exhaust stack of a coal burning plant since her last movie role, as a fed who is hellbent on douchebaggery, and threatens to find whatever shit Cheadle has done in the line of duty that might not be entirely legal and arrest his black ass for it.

Hawke is conflicted because his wife, played by Lily Taylor, is knocked up again, this time with twins, and his mould infested house is killing her and the babies. He already has two kids, and he can’t afford to move them out on a detective’s salary. He’s more valuable to his family dead than he is alive (damned irony) so when his oath to protect and serve bumps up against the harsh reality of providing for his family, he goes all Robin Hood and shit (pun intentional).

Gere, well, what can one say about Richard Gere? He’s looked like he was 50 since he was 20, now that he is 61, he still looks 50 and that just pisses me off. Anywho, Gere is in his last days as a cop, and wakes up every morning to a shot of whiskey and sticks an unloaded gun his mouth and pulls the trigger. He has a rather uncomfortably graphic sex scene that felt a bit like watching your dad getting it on with a chick you went to high school with. He has a fuck you attitude that serves him well, and maybe one last act of heroism left in him before he calls it a career.

If Hollywood has taught me anything, it is that authority is inherently corrupt. If you’re a cop, you’re bad, except when you’re not, because then you’re a hero. If you work for any level of the US government, well, you’re a heartless two faced prick. Except when you stand up to the heartless two faced pricks, because then you’re a hero. Even if you’re a hero, chances are you’re still a prick, but that’s okay, because when you’re a hero, you can shoot and kill whoever you want because guns don’t kill people, heroes do.

This is an average movie with an unsatisfying ending. It suffers from the fact Hollywood does 80 of these types of movies every year so it offers nothing we haven’t seen before. The most fun you can have watching it is to test your own pop culture expertise and spot the influence of other similar movies in the scene you’re viewing. Solid performances getting weighed down by a plot heavy story made me pine for something simpler and more fun.

I rate Brooklyn’s Finest 6 out of 10