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.

Rating: ★★½☆☆ 

Our second Free Baltimore screening is for the upcoming Fox Searchlight’s biopic, AMELIA, starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere. The screening will be on Wednesday, October 21st at 7:30pm at your local AMC theater.

Here is a quick synopsis of the film and what you are in store for.

An extraordinary life of adventure, celebrity and continuing mystery comes to light in AMELIA, a vast, thrilling account of legendary aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart (two time Academy Award® winner Hilary Swank).

After becoming the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, Amelia was thrust into a new role as America’s sweetheart – the legendary “goddess of light,” known for her bold, larger-than-life charisma. Yet, even with her global fame solidified, her belief in flirting with danger and standing up as her own, outspoken woman never changed. She was an inspiration to people everywhere, from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (Cherry Jones) to the men closest to her heart: her husband, promoter and publishing magnate George P. Putnam (Golden Globe® winner Richard Gere), and her long time friend and lover, pilot Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor). In the summer of 1937, Amelia set off on her most daunting mission yet: a solo flight around the world that she and George both anxiously foresaw as destined, whatever the outcome, to become one of the most talked-about journeys in history.

Below we have the trailer for you all to enjoy below:

Now on to the part that you all have been waiting for: how do I win? That is the easy part. The first 50 people to comment on this post with a valid email (it’s displayed only to me) along with the words – “I want to see Amelia for free“, win a pass – good for two to the above screening. Again, if you want to bring a date you still only need to enter once! This is a pass good for two of you!

I do ask that due to the size of the screening that you try and be there by 6:30pm as this will guarantee you a seat. This will allow all of you fine folks to grab your passes and a great seat for the film. You will need to give me your email address (the one you used in the comments below) to validate that you indeed got a pass.

More logistics… I will be there alongside the ticket taker checking emails and handing out passes to the sneak peak. I will be in my Atomic Popcorn shirt (duh!). That should be enough to clue you in to which direction to head.

Make sure you check out our other free screenings in the Baltimore Area.

I must admit that by the end of the second act of Nights In Rodanthe, the sappy romantic inside of me was almost won over by the film.  Almost. But about a minute into the third act, the professional film critic in me took over, immediately recognizing the film’s overly sappy final 20 minutes as a form of exploitation on our emotions.  It’s as if the film is trying to bully us into weeping, saying “Look how sad this is.  And this.  And this.  And this!” Now, here’s a lesson for filmmakers when it comes to perfecting a truly moving moment or moments: never, ever pulverize us with extended shots of characters crying their eyes out.  If crying is ever effective and rubs off on the viewer, it’s because it’s used an appropriate amount of time.  But in Nights In Rodanthe, the waterworks just feel obligatory in a way, but that’s what Nicholas Sparks, who wrote the book the film is based on, is known for: sad endings.  Now, fans of Sparks’ work may very well be satisfied with this adaptation, but to anyone else, it’s just another mushy romantic drama.

But that’s not to discredit the rest of the film, which is overall pretty different and relatively easy to sit through.  Even if Nights In Rodanthe contains the usual gimmicks of a romantic drama, what really sells this thing are its two main stars, Richard Gere and Diane Lane.  It’s obvious that the two of them have good chemistry, which translates well to the screen, and their chemistry is easily the best thing about the film.  But the fact that everything eventually became so weighted down in melodrama made it clear to me that while faithful to the dramatic essence of the 212-page novel, the film is really just a play at our emotions when you get right down to it.

Since Nights In Rodanthe comes from a book by Nicholas Sparks, as I mentioned earlier, it of course takes place in my home state, North Carolina.  Set more specifically in the cozy little beach-town of Rodanthe located in the Outer Banks (a lovely vacation destination), the story follows two love-depressed individuals.  Adrienne Willis (Diane Lane) is a deeply committed mother on the fringe of divorce from her cheating husband Jack (Christopher Meloni).  In order to temporarily escape from the hassles of her personal life, Adrienne has agreed to watch over an inn owned by a close friend (Viola Davis), set precariously on the shore of a beach in Rodanthe.  During an extended weekend, the inn has only one guest: Paul Flanner (Richard Gere), a bone-weary doctor still grappling with the consequences of some recent tragedy.  Both Adrienne and Paul are at the Inn during a weekend where a ravaging hurricane is expected to strike the Outer Banks, so they are basically confined there.  And as they gradually come to learn more about each other, they of course fall in love in the time span of a few days; isn’t that how these things always go?  What happens next?  Well, I’m certainly not one to willingly spoil a movie for anybody, but if you’ve seen enough of these sappy romantic movies, then you can make a fairly accurate guess.

I speak from years of firsthand experience when I say that the Outer Banks is a very relaxing and beautiful place to spend a vacation.  My family and I go down there every summer and thoroughly enjoy it.  So I was pretty excited to see certain locations and areas that I’m very familiar with on the big screen.  However, while it was nice to see the Outer Banks used by Hollywood, I was also disappointed by how the producers portrayed the journey there.  The film has Paul come in on a long winding bridge, which is accurate, but then he boards a ferry to travel to Rodanthe.  That last part is entirely false.  After driving across the bridge, Paul would have to drive down a road that would give him about a 20 to 25-minute drive to Rodanthe without crossing a body of water.  What’s more, after departing from the ferry, Paul drives to Rodanthe, but from the opposite direction.  He drives away from the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, when he should traditionally be driving toward it.  In my humble opinion, it wouldn’t have killed the producers to keep the facts straight where the journey to Rodanthe was concerned.

But back to the movie itself, and as I said before, Gere and Lane are the best things about it.  The chemistry that the two of them share makes their scenes together all the more believable and tolerable.  Despite the typical cliches that are thrown out to us amidst the simple plot line, Gere and Lane are able to shine above all those cliches and sell the material well enough.  In fact, even though I’m giving Nights In Rodanthe an overall negative review, I’d still say that it just might be worth your time on a rainy day if you’re at the multiplex and you’ve seen all the other good movies currently playing; I say that because the two stars headlining the picture.  Also, Scott Glenn has a very good small role in the film as a grieving man who may be part of the reason Paul visited Rodanthe in the first place.  Plus, James Franco is also very good but very underused as Paul’s estranged son.

Director George C. Wolfe certainly has the proper vision for the film, as each exterior beach scene perfectly captures the sunny beauty of the Outer Banks.  In fact, he’s so good at that, that at one time I think I actually felt as if I were back on the beach.

But the main two performances and effective eye candy are ultimately outweighed by the roll-your-eyes-at-the-ceiling sappiness that takes center stage at around the end of the second act.  I wouldn’t have minded it if it hadn’t been so drawn out, especially in one scene where the camera lingers a few seconds too long on a character who’s sobbing their eyes out.  Plus, if you’re familiar with Sparks’ work and/or have read the book, it kind of detracts from the whole experience considering you know on what note the film will end.  So, in the end, Nights In Rodanthe is a wave of ocean water that crashes just before reaching the shoreline.

Rating: ★★½☆☆