It wasn’t until a couple of hours after seeing Brooklyn’s Finest that I realized I’d seen this movie before. OK, so I hadn’t seen this exact film before, but I might as well have, considering director Antoine Fuqua followed the cop-versus-street recipe precisely, only altering it to yield three times the normal results—and I’m not talking success here.
The film tells three stories. Not only do you have Ethan Hawke’s portrayal of Sal, the good cop turned bad, but you’ve also got the undercover man among the thugs (Don Cheadle as Tango) and even Eddie, the “depressed and about to retire” old fogey who needs his one last shot at redemption (Richard Gere).
Each man’s story is supposed to make us question the difference between right and wrong, and the existence of a gray area. Sal steals money from the drug deals he busts (and even kills a few men unnecessarily) in order to afford a new home for his four kids and wife pregnant with twins. Tango sells out his street friends as part of his job and feels guilty about it, often wondering why he’s still a cop. And Eddie—well actually, I couldn’t tell you what part he plays, except to provide some comic relief as he refuses to be a corrupt cop.
It’s the corruption that seems to run rampant. If these men are Brooklyn’s finest, then Brooklyn had better get some more qualified applicants in uniform. This section of the New York Police Department is full of officers that aren’t afraid to kill innocent people and steal from crime scenes to get what they want, so long as they twist the story to make them look good for the media.
While some of this may be true, I don’t even care after the first 20 minutes. While I am originally horrified when Sal shoots a bullet between a known criminal’s eyeballs in order to dash with some dough in the opening scene—after the fourth time in five minutes that a gun is fired—I’m pretty desensitized to it. It’s almost as if Fuqua was sitting in a planning session and instead of spending time working out the script and bringing anything original into play, he was like, “Let’s just have a lot of gunshots, you know, like one every two minutes. That’ll distract the audience from the fact that this movie sucks.”
But instead of keeping the film moving, the excess of violence makes it so I have a hard time caring about anyone in the film.
Sal is a despicable scumbag, and although I feel for him—his wife is sick because of the mold in their house—I can’t seem to get past his terrible accent (seriously, he sounds more like he’s from Georgia’s finest with his southern twang). Then there’s Tango, whose situation is so cliché that I want to yawn. Eddie, on the other hand, is just plain pathetic and makes choices that don’t fall in line with the rest of his character (e.g., he often frequents a whorehouse, seeing the same prostitute and asking her to run away with him—I mean, sure, Gere was in Pretty Woman, but really?)
When it comes down to it, Brooklyn’s Finest is a deceptive film. You walk out of the theater feeling numb from hearing the F-bomb being dropped nearly every other word and your ears ringing from the ridiculous amount of gunshots, and you think, “Hey, that wasn’t so bad.” A few hours later though, all of the flaws begin to take shape in your mind and you feel a bit duped, like you’ve been had. And you realize that—since this movie debates that gray area between good and bad, light and dark—Brooklyn’s Finest is definitely on the “wronger” side of the spectrum.