Brooklyn's Finest

Brooklyn's Finest Review

starring: Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke, Wesley Snipes
director: Antoine Fuqua

I saw Brooklyn's Finest this morning for the first time on Starz beginning at about the 10 - 15 minute mark. I came in to see Don Cheadle and Wesley Snipes apparently reunite as well as Richard Gere teaching some rookie cops the ropes on their first days. The cast for this movie is great, the stars and supporting cast did a great job. I love how 'adult' the movie was. I believe films these days are moving into a Rated-R direction rather than pulling back on swear words to go for a bigger box office hit with a PG-13 movie.

This movie is similar to the smash hit Crash for having multiple plot lines. Unlike Crash, however, they did not intertwine how I thought they would. It seemed like the three main stars would somehow end up speaking to one another at the end at least, but that did not happen. In my opinion, only Richard Gere's character got a rewarding climax. Not just for the fact that he was the only one to survive the ending, but his character had a sense of resolution that the others did not have. I think the character that got the worst ending was Don Cheadle's character because it seemed like everything he had worked for his entire career was blown by a friendly fire mistake in non-dramatic fashion. I don't even want to get in to how disappointed I was to be completed surprised when Ethan Hawke's character got blasted from the back by some random gang-banger who had perhaps one line in the movie, if that.

A better ending would be to have Ethan Hawke's character shoot up the kidnappers apartment right before Richard Gere's character came in to save the girls, and then have the Gere fight struggle as originally planned. Also, Don Cheadle's character should have survived along with Gere.

I think this movie was good, the many plot lines were very entertaining because it made you (the audience) think. I was just disappointed by the ending, I thought it was just too anti-climactic. I believe the movie had hints of trying to be like Crash (even having taking one of the stars from Crash in Don Cheadle), but it just didn't live up to my expectations. None-the-less, this movie was entertaining, and had some good suspenseful scenes.