Brooklyn's Finest

Inside the automobile, the accent is Vincent D'Onofrio, in two of those great character bits they used to do before they started his Olympic scenery chewing on "Law & Order: Criminal Intent."

The camera creeps up on a dark automobile, quiet street. In voiceover they listen to a peculiar New York accent telling how they got off on a DUI arrest because they had been fleeing from Mob thugs. "That's a true story," they insists.

At no point will Hawke or any of his big-name co-stars disappear in to their roles in "Brooklyn's Finest." It is not that the acting is bad, but the film, directed by Antoine Fuqua ("Training Day") & written by first-timer Michael C. Martin, takes its arty ambitions so seriously that the audience basically cannot.

It is a short role. As soon as they gets to the punch line, they takes a bullet to the head from dirty cop & lapsed Catholic Ethan Hawke, who scoops up a bag of money & scurries away.

& so the characters remain Detective Hawke, Officer Richard Gere & Don Cheadle, an undercover cop posing as a high-level drug dealer. Their parallel story lines are traced in film that pretends to the thoughtful intricacy of "Crash," the gritty realism of "The Wire" & the stylish intensity (& high body count) of "The Departed." , it is another collection of noir-lite clichés.

Hawke is racking up clandestine felonies trying to gather money for a deposit on a house. His asthmatic wife suffers from the mold in their tumbledown abode, but his selfless motives cannot wash the blood off his hands. (That is literal blood on his hands, from that bag of money. "Brooklyn's Finest" is large on obvious visual symbolism.)

Gere is a uniformed officer checking off the days till his retirement. (Again, literally, on a calendar hanging in his locker.) They first meet him sitting bolt upright to his alarm. They reaches for a shot of whisky, then sticks his revolver in his mouth & pulls the trigger. Nothing in the chamber.
Finally, there is Detective Cheadle, who is been impersonating a gangster so long they is no longer sure of his loyalties; it doesn't help that they cannot trust his handlers in the department, who like to shout things like, "You think you are a hard guy?" Unfortunately, the character is a lot less interesting than DiCaprio's in "The Departed," & Cheadle shows small rapport with his kingpin buddy, Wesley Snipes.

To add some street cred, the cast includes a few alumni of HBO's "The Wire," including Michael K. Williams (Omar) & Hassan Johnson (Wee-Bey), as drug enforcers. There is & a subplot about community protests over a case of police brutality, which only seems to raise the thematic stakes. In lieu, it is another filmic tool, like the deep shadows & oversaturated colors of the cinematography & the tense ambient soundtrack.