Brooklyn's Finest : Movie Review

First off, I’m pretty sure the title here is sarcastic.

Brooklyn’s Finest is the story of three different cops in Brooklyn, whose stories only intersect in fleeting moments, each one carrying their own story arch. First we have Eddie (Richard Gere), a half drunken police
officer a week away from retirement. He is a wash out, receives no respect from
his peers, mostly because he has done nothing in his career to earn it, and has
no real personal life to speak of. He is just going through the motions until
he can walk away from 22 years on the force with a pension. Then there’s Sal
(Ethan Hawke), a Catholic cop who serves on drug raid teams. He lives in a run
down old house with mold in the walls, with barely enough room for the four (if
I counted right) children he and his wife already have. They are expecting
twins, and his wife’s health is on the decline due to aggravated asthma from
the moldy home. Last up is Tango (Don Cheadle), a drug dealing man with a
prison record who is actually an undercover police office working for a desk
job and to make the grade. He has to deal with the ties he has made in his
double life, and manage the intricate relationship between his duties as a cop
and his experience as a street drug dealer.

I liked the plot. I liked two out of the three characters enough to root for them in the end, and I liked all three of their stories, even if one fell short on the sympathetic characteristics front. I think that’s
what made the movie dynamic: they weren’t all the same, and each actor did a
superb job of bringing these distinct individuals to life, even in the limited
time allotted by a movie split three ways.

Richard Gere was endearingly sad as a lonely, run of the mill cop. He has nothing to show for his years of service, and seems aware of it despite never actually saying those words. He is seen being impassive about
bad situations, like witnessing a woman getting hit outside his precinct and
not going to help, or watching as some shady characters outside an apartment
drag a drugged woman into an unmarked van. He is jaded, almost lazy, but
there’s something noble in him that made me cheer for him, silently begging him
whenever he was on the screen to do something amazing. It was this level of
investment I suddenly found myself having for him that made his performance my
favorite of the trio.

That’s not to say the other two aren’t solid and great as well. Don Cheadle is an amazing versatile actor, and has a presence about him that is impossible to not want to pay attention to. He commands his role with a
grace and subtlety that adds a gritty, but somehow soft edge to his split
character, and makes him engaging and fascinating. It’s strange, finding myself
not wanting a drug dealer (one of Tango’s friends, Caz, played brilliantly by
Wesley Snipes) to get killed or hurt or even caught by the law, but that’s
exactly what happened. They weren’t good guys and bad guys, so much, as two
different walks of life, which I think is exactly what made his struggle so
difficult for Tango, on a personal level. It was cool being able to experience
that, even in such a small way.

Ethan Hawke’s Sal was a character that I could not bring myself to like. I tried, but his bad habits, unethical behavior, desperate vexation and refusal to seek the obvious route to help his family made me not
appreciate him, and not care how his plot really ended up. But this was because
of how the character was written, not how he was acted. All three actors played
their parts well and Hawke is no exception: he is honest and intense in this
dramatic role, and brutally raw.

I have already used two words for describing the actors that I can use to describe the movie itself, overall. Brutal and gritty. Brutal because the writing is not for the lighthearted. There are no jokes here, no
real laughs, and no happy ending. That’s not a spoiler: the first few minutes
of the film tell you exactly what you should expect through out. Bloody and dramatic
though it may be, it is still compelling and not so depressing or violent that
it alienates the viewer right off. Gritty is applicable for how it was shot,
the camera sporting a grainy feel that only adds to that gritty feel.

The film is rated R for a reason. There is a lot of female nudity, sexual situations, violence, blood, and a whole book of cursing, but none of it really seems forced. It might be easily paced at times, but the use
of music and the cutting between the three stories keeps it moving well enough
that those lags don’t add up to much by the end. I would give it a solid B, and
though it feels like the kind of movie I tend to love watching on TV at night,
I would recommend catching it in the theatre, at least at a matinee.