Susan Granger’s review of “Brooklyn’s Finest” (Overture Films)
Director Antoine Fuqua hit the jackpot with “Training Day,” for which Denzel Washington won an Oscar back in 2001, but this new police potboiler about crossing the thin blue line falls short – in every way.
Unfolding during one hectic week, it’s the tale of three conflicted, corrupt cops in the 65th precinct who turn a blind eye to crime, rip off drug dealers and befriend the gangs who are ostensibly running the neighborhood. Boozing, burnt-out Eddie Dugan (Richard Gere) is a veteran patrolman with personal problems: i.e.: a prostitute girl-friend (Shannon Kane). With only one week left before he can claim his pension and retire to a fishing cabin in Connecticut, he grimly shepherds new recruits.
Clarence “Tango” Butler (Don Cheadle) has been undercover for so long that he now protects Caz (Wesley Snipes), the lethally charismatic drug czar he’s supposed to arrest in order to secure a promotion to detective. And Sal Procida (Ethan Hawke) is an edgy narcotics cop who is under tremendous pressure to provide a home with a healthy environment for his wife (Lili Taylor) who is pregnant with twins and their other five children; the financial stress has caused his moral fiber to crack.
Chaos erupts when the NYPD’s Operation Clean Up targets a notoriously drug-ridden housing project and all three officers are faced with compromising, life-changing choices: “There’s no such thing as right or wrong – only righter and wronger.”
Working from rookie writer/former NYC transit worker Michael C. Martin’s cliché-ridden, contrived morality play with its superficial, archetypal characters, Antoine Fuqua and Mexican cinematographer Patrick Murguia interweave the three separate stories, since the protagonists cross paths but never interact until the confused conclusion. While Brian F. O’Byrne, Ellen Barkin and Michael K. Williams lend memorable support, this is Wesley Snipes’ first theatrical release since “Blade: Trinity” (2004); everything else he’s done has gone direct-to-video.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Brooklyn’s Finest’ is a bleak, brutal, pretentious, over-agitated, only somewhat suspenseful 6, making one yearn for Sidney Lumet’s genre classics like “Q&A” and “Serpico.”
