TOO slow to be a guilty pleasure and too dumb to be an innocent one, “We Own the Night” doesn’t say a lot except We Own a Lot of Scorsese DVDs.
Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg are brothers on opposite sides of the law: Phoenix’s Bobby has changed his name from Grusinsky and manages a dance club/drug supermarket in 1988 Brooklyn. Wahlberg plays a cop who, along with his father (Robert Duvall), a deputy chief in the department, tries to persuade Bobby to snitch on the drug bosses he knows.
While Bobby wanders through the first half of the movie trying to make up his mind – the Russians who own his club have no idea he’s from a cop family, and would shoot him if they found out he talked – the drug war is exploding and the dance floor is writhing to the beat of . . . Blondie? In 1988?
Familiar scenes of backroom cocaine preparation, cops wiring up informants and a couple of shootouts work efficiently enough, but only twice does the movie live down to its pretensions to make you taste New York dirtbag living. Bobby, pursued by a few dozen bullets, leaps out of a window only to discover he’s higher off the ground than he thought and his fall will be broken by the ouchy end of a chain-link fence. And a moody, dread-soaked car chase in the rain with a throbbing musical pulse recalls John Williams’ work for “Munich.”
The latter scene, tense and gray and frightening though it is, is nearly ruined by implausible mechanics, as is the overall plot. This is the kind of flick where a guy can be a completely untrained civilian on Wednesday and a member of the most elite SWAT team in the city on Thursday. Here’s your shotgun, pal, hope you can figure out how to use it.
Breaking out of a New York City jail in the 1980s is presented as no more challenging than making Barney Fife look the other way while you steal his key ring, and a hit man who shoots a defenseless guy in the head from three feet away causes only a cheek injury. “Definitely a professional,” mutters a grizzled investigator about the crime. Professional busboy, maybe.
The movie is soulfully paced as it scrabbles for a feel of grand tragedy, but if you’re going to pass yourself off as an art film you have to do better than dial-a-cliché dialogue (“It’s like a war out there,” “Don’t be a hero,” “He’s a dead man,” “We gotta find out where the deal is goin’ down”). Scorsese would have fired the writer, but director James Gray unwisely kept himself around to do the script.
Eva Mendes, as Bobby’s beautiful girlfriend, has nothing to do unless you count walking sultrily in and out of the shadows, and Phoenix, who seems to be growing puffier by the movie, is more mopey than tortured.
At least the bullet-eyed Duvall supplies some brittle edges and hard wisdom, Dan Rather-ish as it is: “You marry an ape, you don’t complain about the stench of bananas,” he says. Even better is “When you [pee] in your pants, you can only stay warm for so long.”
Running time: 117 minutes. Rated R (graphic violence, profanity, drug use, brief nudity). At the Sunshine, the Kips Bay, the Orpheum, others.