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It’s nearly impossible to go into a movie without preconceived notions these days. Not only does Hollywood love to rest on its laurels, it is also the only business that goes out of its way to point it out to you. Taglines such as ‘from the visionary director who brought you Training Day’ is basically like saying ‘this guy made a movie you really liked 9 years ago, and even though he has made six more that were so mediocre we’re not going to mention them here, this one is going to be his best work yet!’ Sorry, but that isn’t going to convince me to see a movie, it actually makes me nervous that the movie itself is so bad that you have to promote the director’s previous work over the actual movie itself.

Add in the reports that Brooklyn’s Finest is one of those films with a bunch of well-known actors came together and took a pay cut because they liked the script so much and wanted to work together, and you’ve got a recipe for a turd sandwich.

Read more AFTER the jump!
But you know what? It was actually pretty good. This could just mean that the ‘Don Cheadle Proxy’ (every movie he appears in, if only for several seconds, is irrevocably good by sheer proximity) is stronger than the ‘Resting Laurels Corollary’ (defined in the previous paragraph), but regardless Brooklyn’s Finest was a not-too-predictable cop drama with enough excitement to keep you interested and enough suspended reality that I got nervous when bad things happened to the main characters. It’s not the type of movie that’s going to inspire a new tagline for director Antoine Fuqua’s next movie, but it’s certainly worth seeing.

Officer Eddie Dugan (Richard Gere) is a cop counting down the days until his he retires so he can get his pension, Detective Clarence “Tango” Butler (Don Cheadle) is an undercover agent struggling to keep
up the ruse, and Detective Slavatore “Sal” Procida (Ethan Hawke) is a policeman who will do anything to provide for his family. When all of these characters get tied up in a drug deal involving a large sum of
money you’ve got the story for every modern cop drama ever...

Say what you will about Fuqua’s films, but the American-born director is good at making sometimes slow developing stories interesting and good-looking with long, crisp, sprawling shots. He frames his characters well and doesn’t make his actors work, which is bad when you have a film with so many well-known actors because it makes it hard for any individual to have a real breakout performance. With Brooklyn’s Finest, though, it works. Having so many stars covers up Wesley Snipes’ utterly horrific performance (seriously, he is just playing a caricature of his own self), and it also allows Cheadle and Hawke to let their subtle brilliance simmer on the story’s backburner.

Brooklyn’s Finest didn’t reinvent the wheel; it’s a cop drama at its heart and no amount of drug slanging or gun wielding will change that, but it does succeed in making its characters something the audience will care about. Because of that, you will care whether or not you saw this movie. 

--Mark Collins
 


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