If you miss The Wire, check this film out | Brooklyn’s Finest (2009)
I am Jason Kleeberg, this is Force Five, and today I’m going to give you five reasons you might enjoy Antoine Fuqua’s 2010 film Brooklyn’s Finest, and make sure to stick around because there are two movie Top 5 lists that this one would definitely be in the running for.
If you miss the HBO show The Wire, I think you’re going to like this. There’s enough DNA here that fans of, in my opinion, the best crime show of all time are going to recognize the feeling immediately. For starters, Michael K. Williams, Hassan Johnson and Isiah Whitlock Jr. all show up. For those who don’t know the actor names, that’s Omar, Wee-Bey and Clay Davis. But I think the connection is deeper than the casting. Just like The Wire, it deals with cops, drug dealers, institutional failure and the increasingly blurry line between the people enforcing the law and those breaking it. If you miss watching those cops and criminals operating within the same broken ecosystem, check this one out.
If you like crime films where no one is completely clean, like Serpico, Prince of the City or L.A. Confidential, you’re probably going to dig this one. One of the central ideas in Brooklyn’s Finest is that there is a right and wrong, and there’s also a righter and wronger, which describes all of these characters perfectly. The story focuses on three cops - Sal, a detective who’s trying to get his kids and his wife, who’s pregnant with twins, a new house, but he’s coming up a little short on the deposit. He’s doing terrible things but he’s justifying those things by convincing himself that he’s doing it for the right reasons. Then there’s Tango, my favorite character in the movie, who’s deep undercover, so deep that he’s formed a really strong bond with the top guy in the gang. And finally, there’s Eddie, a beat cop who’s so emotionally detached from the job that his refusal to care comes with its own consequences.
If you like films about interlocking storytelling - think Traffic, Amores Perros, Pulp Fiction, you’re going to like this one. While I mentioned before that there are 3 stories going, they only intersect in the last few minutes of the movie and it almost feels like 3 separate movies. Sal is in a corruption thriller, Tango is in an undercover cop saga and Eddie is in a “just a week until I retire” kind of flick. There’s a kind of simple pleasure to watching the pieces move around the board just waiting until the moment they intersect, and when they do at the end of the movie, it happens pretty naturally.
You know what else could be a pretty natural thing? Subscribing to this very channel. Hit the like and subscribe buttons at the bottom of the page, it helps me and the show out quite a bit.
If you like gritty, grimy New York, this movie certainly operates on the other side of the tourist postcard. It’s nighttime streets, cramped apartments, housing projects, dirty squad cars, narcotics raids, fluorescent lit police stations and strip clubs. Brooklyn’s Finest is directed by Antoine Fuqua and he’s no stranger to this kind of thing, just look to Training Day for a bit of it on the other coast. There’s a texture to this kind of movie that I dig, where the city isn’t providing a backdrop, it just literally always feels dangerous and everyone in it is tired and running out of time for something. If you like movies like We Own the Night, Narc or New Jack City, I could see you liking this one too.
Finally, I’ve been dancing around it like Raygun here but my favorite thing about Brooklyn’s Finest is the cast. I mentioned Sal, he’s played by Ethan Hawke. Don Cheadle plays Tango, the guy who’s in too deep and clawing to get out, and Eddie is played by Richard Gere. Wesley Snipes plays Caz the gangster who Tango is a bit too close too, and there’s a bit of humanity to him in a surprising way, he’s excellent. And Vincent D’Onofrio, Will Patton, Lili Taylor, Ellen Barkin, Jesse Williams, Logan Marshall Greene and Brian O’Byrne all have supporting roles and everyone is doing their best work. The standouts in my opinion are Ethan Hawke as Sal and Don Cheadle as Tango because you can see their anguish when they have to make really difficult decisions and it’s hard not to sympathize with them even when they’re doing really heinous stuff.
In terms of Top 5 lists, two came to mind. The first comes with a bit of a spoiler, but I think this would make my Top 5 films where a big name actor unexpectedly dies in the first scene. You’ll have to watch it to find out which actor, but other films on this list would be Pyscho and Scream. Unsurprisingly, I think it would be in the conversation for Top 5 Cops In Too Deep. I could have watched a whole two hour movie about Tango’s storyline. Don Cheadle is the effin’ man, I’d watch that man do chores for two hours.
Anyway, if you like The Wire, morally compromised cops, stacked casts, dirty NYC or movies where separate stories all slowly get pulled toward the same destination, give this one a look.
