Brooklyn's Finest: Critic Reviews

Director Antoine Fuqua scoops up the grime off the street and slimes it on the screen.

It's built of rigidly interlocking calamities, and the movie revels in the cartooniest details of street life.

The movie is wounded, but it's also too tough to kill.

An ugly, fatuous, macho piece of self-regarding, self-pitying nonsense about New York cops.

It's good to see Snipes back on the big screen, and the scenes he shares with Cheadle are a highlight. But there's so much unremitting pain, such a constant string of calamities in the lives of all the players, that the dreariness overshadows the story.

At no time will the viewer be under the impression that the performers are engaged in anything but a recycling project, regurgitating 50 years of corrupt-cop movies. Fuqua is striving for gritty street cred and instead delivers a clone.

Brooklyn's Finest is a billy-club sandwich: three separate cop dramas piled one on top of the other, separated by layers of dramatic cheese, and compressed until the condiments run together.

Filled with every cop-movie convention since the invention of gunpowder and curse words, Brooklyn's Finest is three movies in one, all of which you've seen before.

The bravest ones let us in on certain truths about the profession even when they're unpleasant, and Brooklyn's Finest can stand proudly among them.

Whatever one may think of the overall style -- I think it's ludicrous -- Mr. Fuqua clearly wanted his film to be operatic, and so it is, in a tone-deaf way.

The problem for filmmakers trying to make this kind of movie is that they are now operating in a post-Wire world.

The film has a basic strength in its performances and craft, but falls short of the high mark Fuqua obviously set for himself.

It's a movie you truly want to like, because it reminds you of movies you did, most of them made by Sidney Lumet.

Director Antoine Fuqua has come a long way down since Training Day.

Fuqua's sucker-punch of a picture is taut noir of the first order.

The adventures are sometimes interesting; there are stirring, chaotic outbursts of violence. But yelling and shooting alone don't engage the imagination, and the domestic interludes verge on soap opera.

Tawdry, slick and self-consciously gritty.

Fuqua tries to create the illusion of meaning by copycatting the style and techniques of better directors, but he can't save the naked emperor of the script.

Antoine Fuqua is a master of this kind of anxiety -- much like his acclaimed Training Day, there are moments so nerve-racking one is actually afraid to look directly at the screen.

The performances are uniformly good, but Training Day helmer Antoine Fuqua seems to lack the maturity as a filmmaker to match his casting or his budget.

Brooklyn's Finest may well have a future on cable as a drinking game. At one sip per cuss word, though, few viewers will still be conscious for the ending...

You can see why the actors were drawn to this -- good characters, nice monologues, a few explosive scenes. But in keeping all of them happy and still making room for his own excesses, Fuqua loses any sense of pacing.

There's nothing particularly original here in this grime-and-grit saga, but the weak material is elevated by the cast.

Any movie that ends on a freeze frame of Richard Gere walking stoically away from a crime scene teeming with police car lights can't be all good.