Director: Antoine Fuqua
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Don Cheadle & Richard Gere
The impressive cast and the prospect of Fuqua taking a story of crooked cops like in Training Day and applying it to a larger canvas may entertain some but Brooklyn’s Finest plods along predictably and the cast aren’t performing roles they haven’t done before.
After the success of crooked cop thriller Training Day in 2001 which saw star Denzel Washington win an Oscar for Best Actor, director Antoine Fuqua has spent much of the following decade directing a series of average action thrillers such as Tears of the Sun, Shooter and King Arthur. Returning to the genre which brought him such attention in 2001, Brooklyn’s Finest sees Fuqua covering similar territory as before involving what could push cops to break laws whilst showing that crooks are capable of good and exploring such themes with an even larger cast than before including Training Day actor Ethan Hawke. The film though struggles to offer more than superficial explorations of its themes and despite an impressive cast, their stories and performances lack originality in what is a largely average film.
Detective Sal Procida (Hawke) is a cop desperate for cash so he can afford to move his children and his pregnant wife out of their mould-ridden home and has taken to stealing cash from the sites of drug busts to fund the move. Detective Clarence Butler (Cheadle) has been working undercover in the drug community in the hopes of getting a promotion but it may come at the cost of him setting up, known criminal, Caz (Wesley Snipes) who saved Clarence’s life while he was undercover in prison. Officer Eddie Dugan (Gere) is a beat cop only a week away from retirement and pessimistic about the job which has led to 22 years of merely average service and no friends on or off the force. Events over the next week will lead each cop to question what is right and what is wrong by which course of action is most justified with each coming away changed by the experience.
Brooklyn’s Finest is a film that demonstrates ambition on the behalf of director Antoine Fuqua. Here he takes the world of crooked cops and murky morality that he delved into so enjoyable in Training Day and spreads it over a much larger canvas with a larger cast to suit. However, the exploration of right and wrong featuring cops and crooks never really satisfies as the morality tales he is telling are far too simplistic with the ultimate decisions each cop will make, what leads them to make them and what will happen once they do all feeling far too predictable. The film lacks depth or surprise and each plot feels too familiar to other films and the themes once explored in Training Day spread too thinly here. Also somewhat disappointing is that, for all that the three main characters operate out of the same district and the events occurring over the same period, each story is kept too independent from each other to warrant the question of having anything in common at all. No character’s arc has any relevance on another’s adds to the feeling of this being three separate short stories merely being run concurrently to justify being called a single feature whereas films such as Crash weaves separate strands together to make the film feel more cohesive.
Brooklyn’s Finest does boast quite an impressive cast list. Ethan Hawke and Don Cheadle are both decent in their roles, Cheadle more so than Hawke, as cops facing the decision to break rules and laws but neither is covering any ground they haven’t covered before in other films. Richard Gere is more memorable as the disillusioned older cop who grows pangs of conscience in his final days as a cop. Gere shows himself adept at playing someone rather less charming than the roles he is best known for even if his character’s arc is predictable, Gere at least makes the performance convincing. Amongst the supporting cast, there is a memorable turn from Wesley Snipes as the recently paroled crook Caz, with Snipes playing a character and giving a performance that is much more calm and sympathetic than he has done since moving towards straight-to-video action films and serves as a reminder that he is able to deliver strong dramatic performances.
Despite an impressive cast list and some decent performances from its cast, Brooklyn’s Finest is too long and too unoriginal to stand up to Antoine Fuqua’s past crooked cop film Training Day or even against many other films in the same genre. The film is too predictable to really be memorable for anything more than the cast involved, all of whom have performed better. A disappointment.
Rating: 2/5
