The new drama “Brooklyn’s Finest” front loads the cop cliches until you want to haul yourself off to jail just to escape.
One character is just seven days away from retirement, and he downs a glass of whiskey the moment he wakes up.
Another can’t get by on his cop salary and starts stealing money from his drug busts.
What saves “Finest” from the cop movie trash bin is the grit director Antoine Fuqua injects into every story arc. Sure, we’ve seen it all before, but Fuqua captures the danger and disappointment of the workaday cop better than most directors.
It still doesn’t leave a mark like his signature film, “Training Day.”
“Finest” follows a small group of NYPD officers in varying states of despair. Sal (Ethan Hawke) is seen whacking a low-level thug in the film’s gripping opener, all to steal some of his ill-gained cash.
The blue-collar cop can’t make ends meet, and his expanding brood needs a new house he simply can’t afford.
Eddie (Richard Gere) is your typical burned out cop, one who pops the barrel of a gun in his mouth before heading off to work.
Tango (Don Cheadle) is deep undercover, but the man he’s been assigned to bring down (Wesley Snipes – welcome back!) once saved his life.
“Finest” weaves their disparate stories together into a tight, tangible narrative that manages to embrace the “Crash” template and reject it all at once. The film doesn’t just traffic in cliches, it gets itself into a three-car pileup of been there, seen that elements that will leave audiences flabbergasted.
Why did all these recognizable stars sign on for this?
But Hawke’s performance grounds the story by sheer force of will. The actor, trotting out a curious but consistent Brooklyn accent, makes us care about a morally bankrupt cop, one who looks at his children’s moony faces and simply must do whatever it takes to rise them up out of their current conditions.
Cheadle remains a rock-solid film presence, but his character never rises above a thumbnail sketch portrait. Snipes, given the least screen time of the four stars, transcends the script’s Xeroxed moments. But he’s no match for Ellen Barkin, who blazes across the screen as a no-nonsense agent you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.
And just when the story veers toward another stale concept, like Gere’s characters developing feelings for a hooker, a sharp line or retort will snap us out of our lethargy.
Some characters in “Finest” find redemption through strained plot devices, others will realize their choices have put them in situations far beyond their control.
“Brooklyn’s Finest” ends with a rush of violence, some startling, some so expected you could point to the screen and say, “Bang!” and get it right.
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Fuqua mates “The Departed” with “Crash” – rather predictable but I did like some of the less-predictable elements of the conclusion.
D.