Studio Name: Anchor Bay (Overture Films/Millennium Films)
MPAA Rating: R
Disc/Transfer Information: 1080p Anamorphic Widescreen Presentation 2.40:1; Region 1 (U.S.) Release Tested
Tested Audio Track: English PCM 5.1
Director: Antoine Fuqua
Starring Cast: Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke, Wesley Snipes
THIS IS WAR. THIS IS BROOKLYN.
SYNOPSIS:
Boy, did I really want to like this one – born in Brooklyn, New York myself, and living there for some years before moving to the suburbs of Nassau County, in addition to my father owning a furniture business with multiple stores in varying areas of the borough of Brooklyn, I was really looking forward to Antoine Fuqua’s take on the East Coast gangster/ghetto mystique as he did when profiling the West Coast gangs in
Training Day. Actually, what I was expecting – and I suspect others were as well – was an East Coast version of
Training Day; almost like what John Carpenter did with
Escape From New York and then
Escape From L.A. The final product in
Brooklyn’s Finest was a bit different; in my opinion,
Training Day was a cinematic triumph that kept the tension going with electrifying performances by Denzel Washington and some real-life L.A. gang members – the entire film was simply engaging from beginning to end. Although Shawn Edwards of Fox TV claimed
Brooklyn’s Finest was “an absolute triumph,” I don’t agree – it was simply nowhere as engaging as Fuqua’s
Training Day.
One of the most interesting aspects of the story behind this project can be found watching the extra features on the Blu-ray (and DVD); apparently, a New York MTA worker had suffered injuries from a car accident and needed money for a new car – he stayed at home and wrote the screenplay that was eventually picked up by Fuqua and Overture/Millennium Films, documenting the life of Brooklyn cops and their relationships with the hardcore members of the projects in the borough. The problem is, this notion has been done before – remember Keanu Reeves and his band of renegade crooked cops in
Street Kings? That’s what
Brooklyn’s Finest felt like. It had engaging characters and possible story lines, but it wasn’t executed with much excitement or polish, and it suffers for that, making the film as a whole come off feeling not that engaging to watch. Then, there’s the issue of the massive cast that’s in this – Ethan Hawke returns to Fuqua’s acting stable to portray a crooked Italian NYPD officer, Sal, who needs to rob cash from Brooklyn drug lords in order to pay for a new house. Richard Gere seems interesting on paper as a burned-out NYPD cop that’s about to retire but is forced into a rookie program that has him riding around with beginner kids right out of the academy, taking them through the worst parts of Brooklyn, but his character never really develops itself; it’s suggested that the character redeems himself of a career going nowhere by a “heroic” act of freeing some kidnapped white girls being used as prostitutes in Brooklyn towards the end of the film, but it really wasn’t entertaining to watch. Further, we have Don Cheadle playing an undercover officer trying to work his way up the recruitment ladder by taking an assignment of trying to take down major crime figure “Casanova” played by Wesley Snipes – Cheadle’s character drives around in a black tricked out BMW 7 Series, the envy of all the chain-wearing, baggy jean-toting youths in the Brooklyn projects, pretending to be a drug dealing criminal legend amongst them, while also finding it difficult to remain friendly with Snipes’ Casanova character. Normally, with a cast this known and involved, a script and final product suffers for it.
The tone and atmosphere that Fuqua sets in
Brooklyn’s Finest is almost superb – the feel of the Brooklyn streets, the thick, heavy-handed street slang of the African-American youths populating the drug-ridden projects, the almost closed-in feel of the New York City borough, suggesting its roots as a community-driven geographic area. However, it’s the point of the plot – and the splintering sub-plots – that simply don’t make a memorable mark; the essence here is that each of the cops headlining in the plot will somehow meet in a final unrelated fashion at the finale, all fulfilling some kind of “destiny” of sorts. Hawke spends the majority of the film stealing cash wherever he can from whatever drug scum he busts along with other NYPD team members, in an attempt to buy a new house as the one he’s living in with his wife (played by Lili Taylor) and kids is riddled with wood mold. When he’s not off stealing the cash, he’s playing poker in his basement with other gun-wielding NYPD hotheads and telling his daughter her miniskirt is too short; meanwhile, Gere is a depressed cop getting ready to retire from the NYPD and its notoriously dangerous Brooklyn precinct he’s assigned to, and he’s fighting an alcohol and prostitute addiction issue. He is given a last assignment during his final week as a cop to escort rookie officers around the borough in a new program the department is implementing. His first partner doesn’t work out, the two of them clearly not getting along, so Gere’s character is assigned another rookie – and then learns the first kid that was assigned to him was killed in the very dangerous neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
The most engaging moments of the film are when the screen time concentrates on Cheadle and Snipes’ meetings with one another and conversations – you’ll see a great deal of echoing of Snipes’ “Nino Brown” character from the classic
New Jack City here, especially during a rooftop sequence. But to be honest, Snipes is getting old – as much as I wanted to buy him as a kick-***, hardcore thug from the streets of Brooklyn, now older and seasoned and out of prison, there was simply something that was a bit off about his performance. Snipes even admits in a featurette interview that during the filming, although he was born and raised in the Bronx section of New York, he had a difficult time following and keeping up with the slang spoken by the real hoods of the Brooklyn ghetto, used as real background actors in this. Still, the storyline has Snipes’ Casanova character now released from doing hard time meeting up with old “friend” Cheadle (known as “Tango” in the film) in order to organize the street thugs controlling Brooklyn’s drugs, and these sequences are fun to watch – Snipes and Cheadle fire off ultra-quick street slang to one another, knocking you over the head with gangster-esque energy in the vain of
Juice and
Menace II Society. Throughout it all, Snipes’ Casanova doesn’t know that Cheadle’s Tango is an undercover cop assigned to bring him down once and for all.
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