Brooklyn's Finest

Last night I watched Brooklyn's Finest, which was directed by Antoine Fuqua, who previously directed Training Day, starring Ethan Hawke as a fresh-faced young cop.

Ethan Hawke is also in Brooklyn's Finest, this time playing a ragged-faced youngish cop who may have been sleeping in a ditch for the last week, and could certainly do with a shower and a nice bit of cake.

Perhaps now he's played the gamut of police roles, from young and innocent to world-weary and guilty looking, he could experiment. For his next role he could be a naïve ambulance driver, or a fireman with a nervous breakdown, or a coastguard with no discernible personality disorders.

Don Cheadle is typecast as a man with a permanent look of disgust on his face at all around him. Whatever happened to the country-music obsessed cowboy/hi-fi salesman from Boogie Nights?

Although if we're going to talk about typecasting, there's Richard Gere, who a couple of decades ago was the silver-haired charmer who hung out with Julia Roberts' prostitute. Now he's the grey-haired sadsack who hangs out with another prostitute, until she tells him to get out for wanting her to relocate to Conneticut. If this pattern continues then in another twenty years time I suppose Richard Gere will have to a man with incredibly dingy white hair whose best friend takes part in a donkey show every night.

Hmm. Dicky Gere and His Friend The Donkey - doesn't sound so bad, now I come to think of it.

For a laugh, Wesley Snipes is cast as a man who wears awful golfing clothes and then gets shot. Maybe he needed the money, but it's a far cry from the supposed glory of Blade 2, isn't it?

Suffice it to say, there's no happy ending to this film. After all, it's set in Brooklyn, which is where you go if you can't make it anywhere in Manhattan. And not the hipster-paradise of Brooklyn, but gloomy, gritty, grimy projects where people keep getting shot (and Richard Gere's rookie partners have such terrible fates that it's almost comic - maybe there's a director's cut which consists solely of Gere's partners being squashed by falling pianos/eaten by sharks/drowned in raspberry jelly in ascending order of horror, until this Jonah of the 65th Precinct hands in his badge).

There's also a bunch of coincidences that pile up at the film's conclusion, to make you think "Wow, everyone really is connected" or, "Huh? This really smacks of lazy plotting."

You don't need to guess. It's the second one. It's not like you're going to watch Brooklyn's Finest anyway.