Antoine Fuqua has finally reached a point in his career where he has recognised what his forte as a filmmaker is. He started out making action movies, struck Oscar gold with Training Day and spent about a decade trying to thread the needle between genre efforts and more prestigious works. Movies like Tears of the Sun, King Arthur and Shooter seem torn between being action movies and higher-minded social pieces.
Contrast that run with most of his work in the 2010s - aside from the boxing drama Southpaw, he has stuck to action movies and they do not feel self-conscious about their genre.
Released at the beginning of 2010, Brooklyn’s Finest now feels like the culmination of his attempts at respectability.
Interweaving three different narratives, Brooklyn’s Finest is based around three cops in various kinds of crises - good fodder for a movie but these various crises has been the basis of plenty of cop movies you have seen\heard of before.
And that is the problem.
The acting is solid across the board, and the technical elements are solid, but it feels like reheated leftovers. That familiarity also highlighted a more unpleasant subtext. There is something insidious about the way this movie spends its runtime showing the viewer the systemic racism, corruption, and incompetence of the police, and ends on the equivalent of a shrug.
Maybe I am soft-selling it, but while it is bleak, there is something so familiar and predictable about the bleakness this movie ends on, that it just reinforces how unoriginal this movie is. It feels like a parody of the genre but without jokes.
While it is not funny, the movie’s use of metaphor is hilariously on-the-nose:
Ethan Hawke’s home is filled with crosses; when he hides the bag of money, his hands are covered in the dead man’s blood and he has to wash them off.
‘White Rabbit’ by Jefferson Airplane, a song about drugs, plays while Richard Gere and Shannon Kane cut lines of coke (not the drug described in the song).
Deep cover agent Don Cheadle stands in front of multiple images of himself, a visual metaphor for the ways he is deceiving others and himself.
The Ethan Hawke scenes are tense and lead to a predictably destructive finale. Cheadle feels underpowered for his role, but has great chemistry with Wesley Snipes. And Richard Gere is solid as a burned-out veteran.
Aside from its adherence to formula, another problem is that none of the main characters’ stories have room to breathe, and they feel too similar in theme and tone so they cancel each other out. If the script focused on one storyline, it would be a stronger film.
A collection of cop movie cliches, Brooklyn’s Finest is watchable but pointless.
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