Review: Brooklyn's Finest

Fakes the funk and muffs the dunk. Ethan vibrates.

Submitted by mike, 03/05/10 6:42 PM

Antoine Fuqua's Brooklyn's Finest tries very hard to be a serious, gritty New York expansion of the director's fantastic troubled-cop masterpiece Training Day, but falls almost painfully short. The film follows three cops over a tumultuous week in Brooklyn: Dugan (Richard Gere) a disillusioned, dissolute beat cop days from retirement, Sal (Ethan Hawke) the Catholic narc officer desperate to score enough cash to buy his wife and huge family a bigger home and Tango (Don Cheadle), the deep-cover operator tasked with bringing in the dealer (played really well by Wesley Snipes) that saved his life. The three pass each other like ships in the night, their stories only tangentially related, and each, from the retiring cop's vague impotence to Sal's hyperactive, almost neurotic worry are intended to be minor-key, pot-boiled character studies. They're stylish, hyper-gritty and incredibly brutal, but ultimately boring, unmoving, hollow and... false. Bombastically composed and utterly meaningless, it's an attempt to shred the staid clichés of the cop drama with gallons of visceral brutality and "real" humanity that slowly becomes just as boring and unreal as the films it's trying to out-raw.

Brooklyn's Finest shoots for stylish realism, and succeeds on a number of technical levels. It's a masterpiece of set-dec, shot on location in New York in a series of basements and project apartments and police locker rooms so small, filthy and claustrophobic that the atmosphere and the cinematography help the film a good ways along the path to intensity and power. The film, however, is let down by a miserable, cranky script that substitutes violence and viciousness, sweat and smoke and blood for personality, character and motivation. Set against a hyper-real background is a story that's acted well enough to seem at first like the gritty character portrait it aims to be before you slowly start to realize that these three cops are doing things in the story that are impossible to believe, stuff that's so brutal, and psychotically violent that Gere's character is singled out by the film as the one lone moral survivor, and he is played, more or less, as a poor man's Travis Bickle with a badge and a slightly better haircut.

There is nothing aspirational, whatsoever, in any of the characters in Brooklyn's Finest. They're all so crooked as to be broken, and such short shrift is given to back-story or character development that they don't seem in any way to be real people. It's not cop-drama, these guys aren't cops. Fuqua's film was aiming for something more formal, more mature, a statement film about the dissolution of humanity and the drive to protect and help in the face of unending grime and the cruelty of the job. Unfortunately, what story there is in the film intrudes and renders that goal impossible, and the film dies a slow death, a victim of way too much style, way too much violence and not nearly enough character. 3/10

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