“Brooklyn’s Finest” gets rolling with an early scene featuring a dejected police officer who begins his day with a shot of whiskey and an apparent game of Russian roulette. I shivered with recognition, as this is exactly how my mornings get started on days when I know I’m going to have to see an Ethan Hawke movie.
Hawke’s role of badass Italian-American cop (“Sal Procida” — really?) cries out for a young Al Pacino. When you can’t get a Pacino and go with Hawke, it’s a little like reasoning, “I couldn’t get the Escalade, so I settled for a Schwinn.”
I picture Hawke asking his director, Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day” and many flops) for permission to hammer away at a severe outer-borough accent. And grease back his hair. And rock a tough-guy goatee. “Can I wear a big gold cross on a chain?” Sure. “Can I be shirtless and/or clad in a wife-beater most of the time?” OK. “I want to play shattering internal anguish with torqued-up features and an-about-to-burst-into tears frown.” Uh, well, you’re supposed to be a rough-edged bastard, not an anorexic college sophomore majoring in histrionics. “Please?” Er, whatever, dude.
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When Hawke shows us the giant tat of St. Michael that takes up his entire back, we’re reminded of that old fashion adage: Before you go out for the night, remove one accessory. Clearly, both he (and the movie) think tarting themselves up is the only way they’re ever going to be attractive.
Thanks to the spew of chest wounds and the clatter of small-arms fire, the movie is an entertaining piece of trash that isn’t as bad as “Pride and Glory” and brings more action than “We Own the Night.” But it falls way short of “Training Day” and isn’t even in the same genus as “The Wire,” from which it borrows several actors. They all come across as cartoon avatars of their characters on the HBO show.
Sal is a corrupt undercover cop who is looking for drug dealers to rip off so he can buy a better house for his growing family. He’s so poor he lives literally underneath an elevated train, as though sharing a real estate agent with Alvy Singer’s family, the one that lived below the roller coaster in Coney Island.
His story operates in parallel to two other cops nursing big sorrows of their own. Dugan (Richard Gere) is a career cynic, a do-nothing nobody a week short of retirement, who seems bothered by his girlfriend’s habit of dating other guys. Her occupation? Hooker. (Sample dialogue from her: “You gonna speak up or do I have to suck it outta you?”) The redemption train is leaving the station, and if he’s gonna jump on it, he’d better move fast.
Meanwhile, fellow cop Tango (Don Cheadle), who is so good at being undercover that he went to prison in character (um, how is that different from actually being incarcerated?), chafes when told by his handler to help bust a gangster, Caz (Wesley Snipes), whom he has grown to like while pretending to be his friend.
These characters have nothing to do with one another except their borough (at one point two of them literally bump into each other) but they have more in common than the script does with reality.
Within a span of little more than a week, a New York City cop shoots and kills an honor student, another cop causes a kid to go deaf by firing two warning shots inches away from the youth’s ear (the alleged perp is accused of stealing a candy bar) and a third cop gets shot — in an incident mentioned solely as a posting on a bulletin board, like the week’s lunch menu.
That’s all before the finale, which features as many traumatic casualties as seasons one through five of “E.R.” If you’re the kind of viewer who thinks drug kingpins don’t bother to protect their lairs with security cameras in case a brigade of officers decides to storm the place, this one’s for you.
The blam-blam and ka-pow keep things moving for the “Scarface” lover in you, and “Brooklyn’s Finest” may well have a future on cable as a drinking game. At one sip per cuss word, though, few viewers will still be conscious for the ending, in which the three cops finally come to the same place, each for an entirely different but equally ridiculous reason.
The Gere character makes an unexplained U-turn into altruism, while Cheadle and Hawke’s cops don’t even seem cognizant of why you shouldn’t just carry out a shooting spree against everyone you don’t like. Don’t they realize how much paperwork they’ll be in for?