By Barnaby Walter
Although this isn’t the worst good-cop-turned-bad American crime drama, it’s still not worth your time or money. Antoine Fuqua’s unimaginative, TV-movie-esque direction and the dull script fail to make this entertaining viewing. Ethan Hawke plays a Brooklyn cop who really wants to give his family the big house and bright life they deserve, but on his current salary this is only a dream. Richard Gere is also a cop in the same division, but only has seven days left on the force. Don Cheadle is, you guessed it, a cop, but he’s deep undercover in the violent drug gangs that haunt the streets of Brooklyn.
I could watch Cheadle all day long, and when he’s not on the screen you wish Hawke and Gere would get off and let him come back on. Many of Richard’s recent movies have gone straight to DVD; a telling sign that not all is well in the career of the Gere. This could have been a turning point for him, but instead he goes through his catalogue of burnout/spent/I’m-tired-of-this-life facial expressions and decides to leave it at that. Ellen Barkin’s few scenes as Cheadle’s boss liven things up a bit, but as a whole this wouldn’t even be passable as a TV drama, which begs the question how it got to the big screen in the first place.
Brooklyn’s Finest is out now in cinemas from Momentum Pictures, Certificate 18.
