Plot: Three unconnected Brooklyn cops wind up at the same deadly location after enduring extremely different career paths.
My Review: I love a good cop movie. Out of all the genres of movies and sub-genres of movies, cop movies are definitely one of my favorite to watch, so I may be a bit biased in my review. I'll try to be as impartial as I can though.
In many ways, Brooklyn's finest is just a typical cop movie. Between dirty cops, retiring cops, cops in bad financial situations and etc, no new aspects are introduced to the cop movie genre. Don't get the words typical and boring mixed up cause Brooklyn's Finest is far from boring.
From start to finish, Brooklyn's Finest keeps you intrigued with it's well written story and, of course, the fine actors they put on screen like Ethan Hawke, Don Cheadle, Richard Gere and Wesley Snipes. The movie is a bit on the long side, reaching about the 2 hour 20 minute mark. The length, to me, wasn't a problem. In order to show the progression of the story and the 3 main characters, the movie had to be that long.
Which leads me into the characters and their progression. Ethan Hawke's character, Sal, is a dirty cop in a bad financial standing. In the beginning, you see him in a situation which automatically sets him as a dirty cop and as the movie goes on, a desperate person with countless number of kids(litterally countless), all living in a small house. With two more kids on the way, his situation only gets worse and so does his desperation. In the end, as always, desperation and greed never solve problems.
Richard Gere's character, Eddie, seems driven to just give up on everything, His job as a cop and his life in total. His days as an unappreciated cop are numbered and he's alone, no wife, no kids and honestly no friends. As the story progresses, his mentality seemingly stays the same. No matter how much good he does or how long he has worked, he will always be unappreciated. In the end, his motives for his actions are unknown and raise the question of "why?"
Don Cheadle's character, Tango, is also an unappreciated cop in a sense. All his hard work and time put into his job and he never gets rewarded with a raise or promotion. The only chance he gets at promotion, comes at the cost of having to bring an old friend back to jail, Wesley Snipes character, Casanova. In the process of trying to keep Casanova out of trouble, both Tango and Casanova get tangled up in something they could do nothing against.
The progression of the characters is the key to this movie, it's what makes the movie really good. Yes, there is violence, lots of blood and shooting. Yes, there is nudity and sex, mostly from Richard Gere believe it or not. And yes, they're are drugs involved. Those are all just small parts of the bigger picture of the movie.
My only problem, and it is a big one, is the ending. I like how the unconnected stories physically become interconnected but how it all unfolds just felt wrong. Some people who live and die at the end will leave you a bit angry and may even hinder how you felt about the movie.
Overall, Brooklyn's Finest is an intriguing story with good character progression but lacks a good or even logical ending to make it stand out.
Rating: 3.5/5
No comments:
Post a Comment