Biting hard on the gritty cop genre, Director Antoine Fuqua over-directs himself into a pretty darned good film with \u201cBrooklyn\u2019s Finest.\u201d\u00a0 While familiar to a fault, the man who gave us \u201cTraining Day\u201d understands that the bad cop genre might never get old.<\/p>\n
Eddie (Richard Gere) has never been much of a police officer.\u00a0 With just days to go to complete his 22 years making him eligible for full retirement, Eddie wakes up each morning and shoves the cold barrel of a hand-gun in his mouth.\u00a0 He even pulls the trigger.\u00a0 Nothing happens.\u00a0 His girl, a lovely, but popular prostitute, asks him why there\u2019s no bullets in his gun.\u00a0 The metaphor is heavy, but for Eddie, it means more than anything else in the world.<\/p>\n
Tango (Don Cheadle) is one slick cat.\u00a0 He proudly drives his perfect black BMW stealthily through the streets of a run-down government development seeming to have not a care in the world.\u00a0 He\u2019s done his time in the big house and came out a better criminal than when he went in.\u00a0 With gold around his neck, a 9mm always close at hand, and youngsters at his beck and call, everyone thinks he\u2019s the baddest dude on the block.\u00a0 But what they don\u2019t know might be Tango\u2019s ultimate undoing.\u00a0 Tango ain\u2019t no criminal.<\/p>\n
Sal\u2019s a criminal.\u00a0 He\u2019s a family man too.\u00a0 And a cop ta\u2019boot.\u00a0 His work doesn\u2019t pay enough but gives him access to almost enough money to feed his addiction.\u00a0 Sal\u2019s not addicted to drugs or alcohol but to something far more potent\u2014rising expectations.\u00a0 And for Sal that means taking what\u2019s not his, even if he has to kill to do it.<\/p>\n
\u201cBrooklyn\u2019s Finest\u201d is a very manicured film experiment.\u00a0 Like Joe Carnahan\u2019s \u201cNarc,\u201d the movie uses camera techniques to manipulate audience temperatures.\u00a0 When Antoine Fuqua came to Atlanta and screened the movie he talked about changing the color of the lighting for each of his three main characters.\u00a0 It helped him keep them apart in his mind, because he often thought of them as three parts of one person.<\/p>\n
The story is somewhat fractured narratively, but each story-line is fairly well-developed.\u00a0 Initially feeling like three short stories, Fuqua works from a clever script by first time screenwriter Michael C. Martin that connects the three stories in some ways better than others.\u00a0 Gere is well cast and his story remains the most distant.\u00a0 Cheadle feels wrong for the role of Tango but makes us believe him as his character begins to lose purpose.<\/p>\n
Ethan Hawke is flat out marvelous as Sal.\u00a0 Cynics might sneer at Hawke\u2019s tweaked turn here, but at one point the expression of utter despair on his face captured my attention.\u00a0 And considering that the film opens with Hawke as Sal having a conversation with a criminal played by the master of facial contortion, Vincent D\u2019Onofrio, I wondered if D\u2019Onofrio had a hand in Hawke\u2019s scowl.\u00a0 Either way, after his fine work here, I\u2019m hoping to see more of Hawke emoting, and hopefully in bigger movies.<\/p>\n
The cast here is impressive.\u00a0 I mentioned to Director Fuqua that he had a deep bench and I liked seeing Ellen Barkin back in good form.\u00a0 Barken plays the vicious Agent Smith, curling her lip and acting all saucy.\u00a0 She\u2019s like a pit bull in this film.\u00a0 Fuqua, who may have been kidding, told me that she acted in the film for nothing.<\/p>\n
The cop genre lis ong overdue for some gentrification.\u00a0 The tired formulas employed for more than 40 years have really migrated to television making the kind of story-telling attempted in \u201cBrooklyn\u2019s Finest\u201d rare these days on the big screen.\u00a0 But when the cast is this sincere and talented and the director commits himself wholly to the project, a fully crafted and worthy film results.\u00a0 And \u201cBrooklyn\u2019s Finest\u201d is worthy of your attention.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Biting hard on the gritty cop genre, Director Antoine Fuqua over-directs himself into a pretty darned good film with \u201cBrooklyn\u2019s Finest.\u201d While familiar to a fault, the man who gave us \u201cTraining Day\u201d understands that the bad cop genre might never get old.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","no-thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions\/43"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}