Brooklyn’s Finest is overflowing with homages to recent gritty urban dramas and contains a familiar plotline involving a lot of strangers in various predicaments, whose troubled lives ultimately intersect. It’s a good movie, despite lacking much of anything new, although I will say that I left the movie feeling distinctly more depressed than I would have liked. Then again, even in good action thrillers like this, there’s almost invariably something that really bums me out. I didn’t like what happened to Jack Nicholson in The Departed, for example. And I didn’t like what happened to Denzel Washington in Training Day, which also starred Ethan Hawke, and which was directed by Antoine Fuqua, who directed Brooklyn’s Finest as well.
The movie follows the lives of three different New York police officers as they struggle to survive in a world of unremitting violence. Richard Gere is Eddie, a seasoned veteran days from retirement and struggling to cope with a career full of dreadful images that drive him to start his day with a glass of whiskey and a little casual Russian Roulette. Don Cheadle is Tango, an officer who’s been working undercover for so long that he feels closer to his criminal target, Caz (Wesley Snipes), than with anyone on the right side of the law. 
He has a desperate desire for a suit and a desk job but no longer knows if he’ll be able to make the major bust required to get it.
And Ethan Hawke is Sal, a drug enforcement officer without enough money to move his family into a house where his pregnant wife won’t be getting sick from the wood mold. Sal’s is a story that’s probably going to be the biggest stretch to believe. He and his wife are living in a house that’s too small for them and their seven kids, and the dangerous asthma attacks caused by the wood mold are endangering the life of their unborn twins. 
Sal’s motivation to constantly attempt to steal drug money may be encouraged by his certainty that, should the twins be born healthy, the family should easily be able to land a reality show deal. Or at least a sequel. Keep your eyes out for Brookyln’s Finest II: Sal and Lili Plus Nine.
So enough about the plot, you see where this is going. All of the characters are living lives that seem designed to make life in New York look like hell, and the movie is definitely pretty successful in making Brooklyn feel like the Worst City in America. And the performances are all above and beyond what I expected. 
I would suggest that this is definitely Wesley Snipes best performance (except for Drop Zone, of course. That thing was classic), and Richard Gere and Don Cheadle are in top form as well.
But the problem with the movie is that is starts out with enormous promise as we see how impressively the three central characters are presented, and then the movie ultimately dissolves into the manufactured series of coincidences that somehow brings their lives together. It’s as suddenly violent as we’ve come to expect from Fuqua, but the humanity isn’t developed enough to override the saturation of killing. The human element is developed well, but the violence element distantly overshadows it, particularly in the inevitable bloodbath at the end.
But overall, it’s good action and hard violence, and there’s always an audience for that. Terrible date movie, though.
The Bean Meter
