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Antoine Fuqua is an interesting director. Most of his movies feature world-weary macho warriors who plow their way through a corrupt and dangerous system, often embracing that corruption themselves in an effort to cope.  These films—among them King Arthur, The Replacement Killers, and Training Day—are mostly slick action thrillers usually featuring stock characters and well-worn storylines. And yet, somehow, they gain their own individuality as a result of Fuqua’s focus on his actors and their performances.

Watching Denzel Washington rip his way through the flimsy script of Training Day and still conjure a plausible human being  or Stellan Skarsgard’s one-note Celtic villain mutter wearily ‘Finally, a man worth killing’ into the Welsh rain are some of the pleasures to be found in a Fuqua film. He takes an approach towards action filmmaking that one doesn’t see too often these days; he builds the special effects and shootouts around his actors and gives them room to define characters according to their natures.  It doesn’t always save the movie, but it does ensure that they don’t play like business as usual in the explosives factory. His newest film is no exception in this regard.

In Brooklyn’s Finest, a cop and criminal melodrama that likes to blur the lines between the just and the unjust, Fuqua has some great players to work with: Richard Gere, Ethan Hawke, Don Cheadle, Wesley Snipes, Lily Taylor and Ellen Barkin. Wisely, he understands that they are the best reason to see the movie and the strongest bits of Brooklyn are scenes where two or more of the characters come together and converse. Too bad then, that they occupy space with sequences of unrelenting violence and hard-boiled sleazy clichés about cops on the take and wizened drug dealers.

The script follows three different policemen struggling to remain separate from the dark underbelly of the city and over time their lives intersect in not so unusual ways.  The oldest (and drunkest) of these three is Eddie (Richard Gere) a veteran on the edge of retirement who drinks hard, solicits prostitutes and rounds out his bad movie cop behavior with the ever reliable ‘gun in the mouth but he can’t quite do it’ trick. Again, there are signs of care and consideration poured into Eddie and Gere captures such sincere moments of sadness and resignation that it’s a legitimate shock when we find them sharing time with scenes like the one where the old cop frankly instructs a prostitute on how best to please him.  

Also falling prey to the easy stereotypes of urban melodrama is the second, Sal (Ethan Hawke), a narcotics officer who kills drug dealers instead of apprehending them so he can confiscate the cash from their wallet after he mows them down. The screenplay’s sympathy excuse for this is two-fold. First off, Sal lives in a Dickensian shack of a house with his 7 kids and pregnant wife (Lily Taylor) and needs the money to buy a better home. Second, he’s constantly heading into church and confessing his sin, because he does mean well, y’know? Hawke isn’t aiming for subtlety or nuance with Sal. His scenes in the confessional hark back to his own brooding take on Hamlet. He is on a trajectory of destruction and we doubt the filmmakers have much in his future other than a bloody shootout.

The cop faring the best in Brooklyn’s Finest, despite being every bit as much a cliché as Eddie and Sal, is Don Cheadle’s Tango, an undercover agent in the drug precinct who has gotten too chummy with a dealer named Caz (Wesley Snipes) and has been in character so long he’s starting to have an crisis of identity and conscience. Tango is being offered promotions at work to ensnare Caz, but he can’t bring himself to take the man out because they are friends. Snipes is no more than a supporting player here, but his scenes with Cheadle are so good that you easily forget that the drama they are enacting was exhausted the moment it began.

All of Brooklyn’s Finest is really like that. After The Departed, filmmakers looking to evoke the deadly, seedy nature of big city deterioration and criminal escalation need look no further than shady police stations and under-handed drug ops on the fly.  The film is competently lensed by Patrick Murguia and the city has a sheen of urban desolation and metropolitan bustle that work at odds with one another. The action scenes are remorseless and brutal, but they are clearly captured and staged with a technical precision. So much of the film is working together that often in the midst of watching it, Finest feels like a good movie when it’s more a really well-dressed bad one.

How well you take to it will depend largely on your stomach for the archetypes and generalizations that exist within ‘bad cop’ movies. Although the language, the abundance of moral gray area, and the grim bloodshed is supposed to make the film more realistic, everything has been so perfectly calibrated that Brooklyn’s Finest feels as far away from the real world as Alice in Wonderland. To see this you would assume that poverty, not wealth, is the surest road to corruption and that every city cop who spends anytime confronting the seedier elements will be forced to eventually partner and sympathize with them.

As a passing action drama Brooklyn’s Finest does what it needs to do, but stop and consider what’s up there on screen and it all falls apart faster than Gere’s Eddie on a whiskey bender.

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