Just released yesterday, Brooklyn’s Finest isn’t my kind of movie. It isn’t nearly as good as Training Day, which also starred Ethan Hawke and was directed by Antoine Fuqua.
Brooklyn’s Finest (Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke, Wesley Snipes) – The director who brought you Training Day creates this bad imitation of a cop drug/death/corruption/bloody film with Brooklyn’s Finest. Antoine Fuqua knows inner city gritty, which I don’t. All I can conclude is that I want no part of Brooklyn. Fuqua presents almost every African American as a drug-dealing, gun-toting miscreant who hates cops. Every woman is portrayed as a sexual object who doesn’t wear her blouse and is a subservient prostitute. The cops are almost all white bigots who drink, smoke, gamble, steal and target all the African Americans. It’s truly a black vs. white movie with bad people everywhere. So this is New York, New York? Fuqua knows how to create gritty, raw, urban films primarily targeted at an urban audience. Training Day was a tremendous character study with two big stars, Denzel Washington (in an Oscar-winning performance) and Ethan Hawke. Hawke is one of the cops in Brooklyn’s Finest, the one who is desperate for money to get his family out of its asbestos (or some other carcinogen)-infested apartment. He’s a good and brave cop but his personal situation overwhelms him. Hawke dominates the movie even if he gets the third credit to Richard Gere and Don Cheadle. Gere is the cop one week from retirement who is asked to put the new police graduates through their training (we see him in two or three “training days.”) He had has an undistinguished career but at least he survived, largely by being a peacemaker, not a cowboy. He seems conflicted, too. He has never known anything but police work yet he has done little to clean up the streets. Then there is the Cheadle character, who is the ultimate undercover cop now desperate to get a promotion to detective first grade, come in from the cold, get a desk job and wear a suit. The scum he spends his day with have got his head swimming. Violence and drugs are his life, and he wants to get out.
I would like to tell you that the film works as both psychological drama and great cop tale. But it doesn’t. Sure, there is plenty of blood – everywhere. Indeed, the performances are good. But the story is just too dark (so is the lighting) and the characters too stereotyped to make this compelling theater. For me, it was a yawner. Moving from one mass killing to the next isn’t enough for me. There has to be real drama and at least a drop of redemption to make this kind of film truly work. It just fails.