A trip to grimmest copland with a fine pedigree and long tradition on both the big and small screen standing behind it, in a way Brooklyn's Finest falls prey to the paradox it sets up in its first and most riveting scene. A known criminal named Carlo (Vincent D'Onofrio) is explaining to his NYPD connection Sal (Ethan Hawke) the lesson in the difference between ethics and morals that a judge recently gave him. "It's not a question of right and wrong," Carlo recalls the judge saying, citing a defendant who had to break the law to do the right thing, "but of righter and wronger." The three cops whom director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) follows through his two-plus hour urban melodrama traverse a similarly tricky x/y axis of good and bad vs. right and wrong, each one plotting a different course across the matrix of what it means to serve and protect. It's a classic set-up, if one whose tropes are ultimately pumped up beyond recognition with pomp and portent.
A marquee starring cast that is itself supported by an enviable array of day players, Sal's NYPD colleagues (this is a triptych narrative where the players merely cross paths, usually without acknowledgement) are Eddie (Richard Gere), a veteran officer a week from retirement, and Tango (Don Cheadle), an undercover agent desperate for a desk job. While Tango plays the part of a thug with a conspicuously peaceable bent -- tasked with taking down the drug dealer (Wesley Snipes, silky smooth) who saved his life, he must compromise himself to make detective -- Sal has gone rogue by the time we meet him.
Frenzied in his quest to move his family from a mold-riddled house, Sal has been skimming drug busts for extra cash, feeling justified by his miserable pay and the corruption of the NYPD brass. A Catholic with clear rhythm-method issues (his handful of children will soon be joined by the twins his wife, played by Lili Taylor, is carrying), Sal attends confession looking not for forgiveness but heavenly favor. Hawke may be the most quizzically cast Brooklyn Italian since Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets, and his methed up performance is the worst offender of the comparatively subdued bunch. Everything that could have gone wrong about his take on a similarly hamstrung family man in Before the Devil Knows Your Dead is on display here, as though even his director caved under the shadow of Hawke's patrician punk glower and mighty cheekbones.
Fuqua often seems equally unable to control himself: the script's initial full-court press of information and character introduction is frequently undercut by self-impressed filmmaking. From lingering on Hawke's tortured reaction shots to showy mirror work with Gere and a baffling shot-reverse-shot conversation sequence that has both Cheadle and his partner speaking directly to camera, Fuqua can't seem to get out of his own way, in love with a certain angle or effect despite the distraction it creates from the story.
What comes across cleanly is a satisfying hit of Brooklyn grunge: shot largely on location, Fuqua moves from precincts to projects to slumlord walk-ups, going not for realism but an invocation of the bad old Brooklyn that even those of us who live there see mostly in the movies. Forced to tutor new recruits during his last few days on the job, Eddie's first lesson for his young partner, as they cruise through roughest Brownsville, is in respecting turf boundaries above all else. In their case that means ignoring a domestic battery taking place in plain sight because it's outside of their precinct's jurisdiction -- it's the right thing, but is it the good thing? For an apathetic cop like Eddie -- whom we meet, in a cringing bit of narrative economy, pouring whiskey and putting an empty gun in his mouth within seconds of waking up -- a moral awakening is a pretty long shot. Gere inhabits Eddie's defeat with winning and occasionally moving subtlety, particularly in his scenes with his favorite prostitute, who is played with startling warmth and pragmatism by Shannon Kane.
As each man moves inexorably toward the consequences of his moral bargaining (first-time screenwriter Michael C. Martin has each of their fates play out in the same projects complex), Fuqua seems to slow his otherwise judicious pacing down for an elongated triple climax. The actual terms of each cop's showdown don't bear much scrutiny: less culminations than machinations, all three are resolved according to their actions, and the upshot is fairly pat, if unpretty -- Fuqua seems to have a special fondness for mouths that babble with blood. In a perverse bit of Brooklyn justice, the film's climax succumbs to the struggle animated by its characters: It's not the wrong ending, but that doesn't make it a good one.