Brooklyn's Finest (2010)
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
Enforcing the law within the notoriously rough Brownsville section of the city and especially within the Van Dyke housing projects is the NYPD's sixty-fifth precinct. Three police officers struggle with the sometimes fine line between right and wrong.
3 connections found
View:
3 films that influenced Brooklyn's Finest
What critics say influenced Brooklyn's Finest
While mould works as a serviceable metaphor for the rot in the system, mouldy might also describe the screenplay for Brooklyn’s Finest , which seems to have been dragged out of basement storage where it was left in the seventies and early eighties, when melodramas about New York cop corruption ( Serpico , Prince of the City ) were in vogue.
There are only a few authentic, high-quality New York City cop films: “Serpico,” “French Connection,” “Prince of the City,” “Narc,” “Training Day.”
It comes to us from director Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day’’) and writer Michael C. Martin, both of whom seem to be aiming for the outer borough existentialism of a filmmaker like James Gray (“The Yards,’’ “We Own the Night’’), who himself is working from the urban template of Sidney Lumet classics like “Serpico’’ and “Q&A.’’
Directed by Antoine Fuqua, whose Training Day elicited fine, against-the-grain work from Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke, Brooklyn's Finest owes much to the New York police dramas of Sidney Lumet: Serpico, Q&A, Prince of the City.
Screenwriter Michael C. Martin recycles many plotlines and conflicts that can be found in superior crime thrillers such as The Departed andTraining Day, but what keeps the film engaging are the solid performances and a few intense sequences.
Each actor, including Wesley Snipes as a fresh-out-of-jail ex-con, gives one of their grittiest performances in this gripping cop drama reminiscent of 2006's The Departed and 1991's New Jack City.
Their parallel story lines are traced in film that pretends to the thoughtful intricacy of "Crash," the gritty realism of "The Wire" and the stylish intensity (and high body count) of "The Departed."
The three leads often are good, as is most of the supporting cast (including Wesley Snipes as an intimidating and dangerous drug lord, and Vincent D'Onofrio in a brief cameo), but they're given too little to work with.By the final act, it doesn't even appear as if Fuqua knows where he wants to go, and everything heads into a downward spiral of excessive, pointless violence (unlike, say, the cathartic and truly shocking violent spurts in "The Departed") and ham-fisted symbolism (dead bodies spread out in a Christ pose juxtaposed against a painting of Christ on the wall above them?
With the captivating “Brooklyn Finest,” Director Antoine Fuqua once again proves his mastery of the cop/crime drama genre, making for the best of its kind since “The Departed.”
Antoine Fuqua's film feels like a grittier NYC version of The Departed but it mistakes the action of that film and its tale of undercover cops as being more crucial to its success than the characters.
This is the most interesting of the morally conflicted tales, a low level "Donnie Brasco."
We've seen Tango before in decades' worth of crime pics (Johnny Depp's Donnie Brasco rooted around in this dilemma of duplicity, powerfully), but Cheadle's urgency and uncertainty feel real.