BROOKLYN'S FINEST (2009)

Brooklyn's Finest is a funny type of film. It's very well done, there's no doubt about that, but then you would expect that with Antoine Fuqua in charge, director of the hugely successful Training Day. It's polished, shot in a similar way to that film, shaky camera work, grey colour palettes, bloody violence pulled off with aplomb - it has all the hallmarks of a film made by an accomplished film maker who knows what he's up to and is confident in his own ability.



It's got a good cast as well. Richard Gere, Don Cheadle and Ethan Hawke, with a little treat in the form of Wesley Snipes before he was put in the slammer for tax misdemeanours. They all do a good job, very watchable with plenty for them to play with. Set as tensions between police and drug gangs escalate, Gere is the old street cop 7 days from retirement, made to take rookies out on the street and bed them in as the horror of a war unfolds, Cheadle is undercover, fighting the battle from within, fully immersed in the gang world while Hawke is the cop straying into criminality, stealing drug money from police raids to try and support his family. All characters that we have seen before in 101 other movies and television series over the years.

And that is essentially the problem with the film. It's all been done before. We've all seen the story where the boundaries between the good guys and the bad guys blur, everyone has seen a film before where an undercover cop loses a grip on what he is meant to be doing and there is certainly nothing new about an old do-gooder bobbie on the beat losing faith in the job. Plagiarism isn't the main problem though, many great films have taken on elements from and been influenced by other stories, whether it's movies, TV or books, but if you are going to use a set-up as familiar as this, you must attempt to do something fresh with it. Fuqua and writer Michael C Martin does not. He appears to think that because we are so up to speed on these types of characters, that he doesn't need to flesh them out and build them up. We should already know their motivations.

We are given scenes where back story is shown, Hawke's family, growing now because of twins, are shown in poverty, Cheadle misses his old life and begs his boss to be taken off the case, while Gere muses to himself and a prostitute that he visits. It's all paint by numbers story telling and very much there for the sake of it. It doesn't help us to sympathise or connect with the characters, I was never fully taken in.

Once we get to the end, which, to be fair, is not as predictable as I was expecting and therefore far more enjoyable, I didn't really care what happened to the three leads. It was clearly meant to be an emotional conclusion that would shock and upset the viewer, but the detachment continued and, as I did for the entire film, felt at a distance from the proceedings. I should really have been immersed.

Watchable, but no more than that. This is definitely not Brooklyn's finest.