Brooklyn's Finest

Cop Land - Wesley Snipes and Don Cheadle in Brooklyn’s Finest
 
Time Investment: 140 min.
Return on Investment: 125 min.
 
Some things never change. Ethan Hawke is still trying to convince us he’s a bad boy, Richard Gere still likes making prostitutes feel like his girlfriends and director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) is still making movies about good cops going bad—and that’s a good thing in his newest film, Brooklyn’s Finest (Overture).
 
The film follows three cops from Brooklyn’s 65th Precinct in their struggle to balance their personal and proffesional lives. Eddie (Gere) is a week from retirement and can’t remember why he got into police work in the first place. Sal (Hawke) has a pregnant wife who’s sick with mold poisoning and he’s willing to do anything to get her and his kids into a new house. Finally, Tango (Don Cheadle) has been undercover so long he’s starting to forget where his loyalties are. By the end of the week, all three  will be pushed to their breaking point. The trio also conveniently wind up in the same low-income housing,  where each is tested one last time. The projects see more action than they did in Candyman.
 
Brooklyn’s Finest could make  a good case for law-enforcement reform,  with its overworked, underpaid and disenchanted police officers more worried about their own safety than anyone else’s. As we learn in the film’s opening moments, set near a foreboding Green-Wood Cemetery, the law is not a matter of right or wrong—it’s often about who is righter or who is wronger. And that fuzzy distinction is the scariest revelation of all.