Review of Brooklyn's Finest, the new film from Training Day director Antoine Fuqua starring Gere, Hawke, Cheadle and Snipes. Looks superb.
Training Day, Antoine Fuqua’s 2001 drama about a corrupt LA narc (Denzel Washington, who won an Oscar for his horrible motherfucker performance), is a nasty piece of work, as intense as it gets. It’s a true modern classic, and if you haven’t seen it you need to rectify the situation before you talk to anybody about cop films. Fuqua set his own bar high, and while his new film Brooklyn’s Finest doesn’t hit that bar, it’s a great companion piece, a sprawling, sweltering morality tale with characters who inhabit all the dirty little grey areas between good and evil. Richard Gere’s a good officer with a penchant for prostitutes, a week away from his retirement; Ethan Hawke’s a detective doing the wrong thing by the law in order to do the right thing by his family; Don Cheadle’s an undercover cop suffocating in his double life; and Wesley Snipes is his close friend, a drug dealer fresh out of jail. The film gets lost a bit among its various plot strands, but the performances are so good it really doesn’t matter; this is a cast of absolute powerhouses, and they’re all incredible here. If it was up to me I’d give them all Oscars. But
it’s not up to me. I have no affiliation with the Academy. But you get my point.
We’re giving tickets away to see this at Vue Cinemas across the country to Sabotage Times newsletter subscribers all this week. Register now to be in with a shout of a pair.
