Brooklyn’s Finest

  

Brooklyn’s Finest? Not really. Oh, why do they use film titles that lend themselves to cheap puns? But in all seriousness, this isn’t very good.

Antoine Fuqua has had an odd career, with a couple of gems, like albeit flawed Training Day or unashamed actioner Shooter, but in-between he produces absolute rubbish, such as Tears of the Sun and especially King Arthur. Both of those films suffer from ambitious over-reaching and despite Brooklyn’s Finest seemingly cut from the same cloth as Training Day, it’s definitely the same problem.

Instead of giving us one, focused and gritty tale of a cop, he tries to give us three. Focus goes out the window and the result is awkward and desperate. We have loner Richard Gere as a regular cop a week away from retirement, forced to train new recruits. He’s jaded, cynical, alcoholic and emotionally dead, except for being in love with a prostitute, the silly sod. Then there’s Don Cheadle as an undercover officer who desperately wants out before he loses his mind. And finally Ethan Hawke plays a narcotics officer who has almost completely gone over the line, willing to do anything for cash so he can get his family into a better home.

They all inter-cut together, supposedly culminating on the same night, so you might be forgiven for thinking that the three separate plots might converge at some point, in some clever and insightful manner. Well, Pulp Fiction this is not. There are one or two minor overlaps and one more important scene that might just make you groan and that feels so desperate it ruins Cheadle’s segment, which had been the best of the three (strangely, that was the problem with Training Day). Gere’s plot ends up being the most satisfying, though it’s so ploddingly predictable, it hurts! And Hawke’s story line is a miserable experience from start through to its nasty, pointless ending.

All three leads do their best to put the fine in Finest and they might keep you watching. I did enjoy watching Cheadle and Gere, and Hawke did nothing wrong, but his story was so awful it detracted from his efforts. Wesley Snipes is great too. He pops up as a friend of Cheadle’s that he is forced to consider entrapping by Ellen Barkin, who has an dreadful character to play. A rabid Rottweiler would have been more subtle and would definitely have had better dialogue. A curiosity to see Snipes in a rare sombre role is as good a reason as any to see this film though.

All three plots are too weak, but two could have been bulked up into fairly decent movies on their own. They would have always been predictable, so joining them together seems like an attempt to hide them and make you feel like you’re watching something important and worthy. But it was done in such a cack-handed manner, it’s just pretentious and the almost complete absence of any tangible link is insulting. I could excuse it if there was some gratuitous action to balance it out, but there’s nothing.

In one scene, Gere visits his hooker friend and walks in on her and another client. Later she tells him, “I’m sorry you had to see that”. I know what she means, still, like Star Trek odd numbered movies, I’m now looking forward to Fuqua’s next project because it should be a cracker!

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