Brooklyn’s Finest **

As movie clichés go, the New York cop movie is perhaps one of the biggest. It is so easy to make a cop movie set in New York City but actually making one that is original or innovative is actually pretty difficult, this being something that has become more evident in some of the more recent NYC cop thrillers to come out of Hollywood, the best example perhaps being 2008’s Pride and Glory, a film which certainly had the credentials to be a great film but fell victim to its lack of innovation or fresh ideas. And the latest cop thriller set in the Big Apple, sadly, isn’t much different. While Brooklyn’s Finest is directed by Antoine Fuqua, who won much acclaim for his 2002 film Training Day and apparently signed on to direct this film because he was impressed by the script, it is a film every bit as cliché riddled as many cop thrillers before it.

Three doomed New York cops working in the city’s most dangerous precinct are each striving to conquer their personal demons. Tango (Don Cheadle) is a dedicated officer trapped in a deep undercover assignment where he’s losing his identity and being forced to implicate his best friend Caz (Wesley Snipes). Sal (Ethan Hawke) is a loyal husband struggling to provide for his growing family and tempted by the drug money seized by the department. Eddie (Richard Gere) is an unstable and depressed loner on the verge of retirement, having to mentor a rookie graduate fresh from the academy. The three are never destined to meet but each find themselves on a similar path to self destruction as their lives lead them towards fateful encounters with their inner demons.

It is really hard to see exactly what it was about the script for Brooklyn’s Finest that attracted director Antoine Fuqua as this is yet another New York City cop movie with little to distinguish it from the countless others that have come before it. Screenwriter Michael C. Martin deploys virtually every cop movie cliché and convention in the book and, unless this is the first such cop film you have ever seen, you will most likely have seen it all before and much better. Of course, an over reliance on cliché might not pose too much of a problem if Martin at least created an interesting plot out of it all or provided some fresh spin but, alas, such things are not to be found here. A long winded and largely uninteresting plot based around three separate stories that barely even cross paths with one another, let alone interconnect or come together in the end, makes for a film that just seems lifeless and dull for the most part, failing to really engage the attention or show any sign that Martin has genuine screenwriting talent. Being a New Yorker himself, Martin does at least manage to deliver dialogue that sounds true to life but even then he fails to provide any particularly memorable lines. What’s more, the characters largely conform to classic two dimensional stereotypes – undercover cop struggling to reconcile his cover with his real life, family man struggling to support his family and tempted towards corruption and embittered veteran cop just biding the time until he can retire – only being granted that all important extra dimension courtesy of intense performances from the film’s four principal actors. This is the one area where the film does deliver something of value. All four of the film’s leads are very good in their roles, putting in genuine grit and emotion, and delivering performances far better than this film really deserves and making it just about watchable. Sadly, though, there is little else positive that can be said about this film as even Fuqua’s work here proves to be very underwhelming, him managing to create a sense of raw, gritty realism but failing to show any visual flair that could make this into something more than what it is – generic, by the numbers and immediately forgettable, not only lacking in originality but also edge. As cop movies go, Brooklyn’s Finest is not among the finest that New York has to offer.

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Review by Robert Mann BA (Hons)

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