Following a decade of declining interest in his work, Brooklyn’s Finest marks the return of Antoine Fuqua to the subject of his biggest hit Training Day, the police force. Of course the title of the film is meant to be ironic, there is nothing at all fine about the cops we are shown here, and the film’s three leads can be described as corrupt (desperate father Ethan Hawke), lazy (nearly retired Richard Gere) and confused (in-too-deep undercover cop Don Cheadle).
The film is acted well, with Ethan Hawke surprisingly good as a man driven to illegal activities to support his family, as well as an almost unrecognisable Wesley Snipes in his comeback role as a drug dealer. There is also a degree of visual flair in the film’s capturing of New York’s mean and moody streets and the drama is driven by an effective and powerful score that gives an urgent feel to the action, but despite all this, Brooklyn’s Finest is still a completely underwhelming experience. Like Fuqua’s other films, Brooklyn’s Finest confirms that he can direct he just can’t pick an interesting script – after all, even Training Day was fairly unexceptional, only really deemed a must-see by the sight of a well-loved actor trying something very different. Ultimately the problem with Brooklyn’s Finest is that its script is so full of clichés it renders the final film a drab and dreary rather than thrilling or insightful experience.
Despite the film’s clear aspirations to be like The Wire (as proven by it’s similar setting to that series, its brief flirtations with discussing race relations and the sheer amount of actors from the programme who show up in supporting roles), Brooklyn’s Finest owes more to cop dramas of the 70s and 80s, and ends up feeling embarrassingly out of date as a result. In order to supposedly give some significance to the drama, Catholic imagery meaninglessly appears in most scenes like a lazy Abel Ferrara rip-off, and the film’s treatment of women is impossibly tedious. Are women not allowed to serve in the New York police force? That would explain their complete absence from the action of this film – Brooklyn’s Finest instead presents the headquarters and homes of the police as places populated by scenes of aggressive, sweaty masculinity so over the top that they might as well be described as homoerotic. The female characters who do appear all fall into overused stock types such as the hooker with the heart of gold, the long suffering wife, and the lone woman who has risen to a position of power by doing so in an administrative capacity, and as such is presented as a mean bitch who knows nothing of what the work is really like. There’s nothing wrong with focusing on a culture of male bonding and rivalry as such, but Brooklyn’s Finest even messes this up, offering nothing but clichés and underdeveloped plot lines.
Perhaps the most unforgivable thing about Brooklyn’s Finest is it’s over-inflated running length. Despite the fact that the plot’s main developments can all be predicted within the first ten minutes (Will a small notice barely glanced at early on in become a major plot point later? Will a minor cough inexplicably turn into a life-threatening illness? Will the three unrelated main plot threads come together in laughably clumsy ways towards the end of the film? You bet they will!) the film lumbers on for a further two and a half hours, and stealing that amount of time from its audience really is a serious crime.
