Edward Robertson from atomictown.com echoes my sentiments more eloquently on Brooklyn's Finest.
'Brooklyn's Finest' lacks momentum
By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com
I have a strong bias against any story or world that gets revisited too often, which explains my aversion to both 12-volume fantasy series and getting up in the morning.
This is why — despite sharing a birthday with Lewis Carroll — I have no interest in anything from Alice in Wonderland other than grown women in that little blue dress. It's one of those cultural krakens whose slimy tentacles pop up everywhere. I feel like I already know everything there is to know about the Queen of Hearts and her castration obsession.
-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.
Doesn't the love of a story's weird, wild imagination start to dim by the 8,000th time it's made into a movie? What I'm getting at is screw you, Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and your $41 million opening day. You're out there boring us in old and busted ways when we could be getting bored in slightly newer ways by cop dramas such as Brooklyn's Finest.
Three cops are in desperate straits: Ethan Hawke, whose family is already too big for his moldy home — and now his wife is pregnant with twins — steals cash from dealers during drug raids. Suicidal Richard Gere is about to retire from an undistinguished career in which he never went out of his way to do better.
And deep undercover Don Cheadle is ordered to set up old friend Wesley Snipes. As each policeman struggles with the hardships of the job, violence looms on the horizon.
Brooklyn's Finest unfolds its three variations on a theme with the stately grace of a much better movie. Director Antoine Fuqua manages detail well, letting the specifics of the characters' troubles drift in from the background. It looks good and is paced with the measured step of a movie with big stuff on its mind.
But yeah, I just never really got into it.
At first, that pacing feels deliberate, the slow, steady, medal-winning kind tortoises are always lecturing you about even though they haven't won another race since, the pompous windtards. Turns out, however, Brooklyn's Finest limps because it has a fierce case of gout.
Thing is, its stories are weak. Hawke's might be able to stand on its own, but the others are one-note and undercooked as ground beef sashimi. The movie's interwoven structure can only disguise this so long before you start to wonder where any of it's going.
The characters aren't much stronger. You've got the guilty Catholic, the week-from-retirement alcoholic, the undercover who's spent too much time under those covers. All Brooklyn's Finest is missing is a hollering police sergeant and that guy who makes his mouth sound like robots and airplanes. In fairness, the script spends a lot of time trying to develop its leads, but split three ways, the picture remains blurry.
In some cases it's not just cliched, it's outright derivative. While I'm always happy to see not one but three cast members of The Wire populating a similar universe of cops and crime, another scene is lifted whole hog from Al Swearengen's patented Blowjob Monologues. Bad call, writer Michael C. Martin. Al doesn't tolerate thieving. He's not about to let a little thing like being a fictional character from the 19th century stop him from teleporting naked into your living room Terminator-style and knifing you in the kidneys.
For all the talent on display — the cast is great, the direction is confidently understated, the dialogue works — Brooklyn's Finest has the momentum of a dropped handkerchief, and its "police offers on the edge" triptych doesn't justify itself.
But it still beats Alice in Wonderland.
Grade: C
