'Brooklyn's Finest'

'Brooklyn's Finest' (R) **

Writer: Michael C. Martin
Director: Antoine Fuqua
Starring: Richard Gere, Ethan Hawke, Don Cheadle, Wesley Snipes, Lilli Taylor, Will Patton, Ellen Barkin, Michael Kenneth Williams

With it's wonderful cast and with the very talented director of "Training Day" you would expect "Brooklyn's Finest" to be great or at least decent. Though what you have here is a good start that deteriorates into a very flat and confused cop thriller. There is not even one character half as compelling as the evil cop played by Denzel Washington in "Training Day". I actually could see Washington turning down a movie like this for it brings nothing new or fresh to the cop genre. Now to a regular moviegoer is it entertaining? It is sometimes but I got bored and couldn't wait till it ended. This movie is overlong and that would be okay if we were into it's story but we have seen this material before many times. There is no originality and only at the end when one cop does a heroic thing did it seem to have any life. The movie concerns three different cops in Brooklyn. There is a cop about to be retired played decently by Richard Gere but he has been much better before. There is a second cop who is deep undercover and getting involved with a criminal friend. That cop is played by Don Cheadle who comes off best here. The friend he is involved with is played by Wesley Snipes. It is good to see Snipes back but what a weak comeback, his character is badly written. Ethan Hawke is the third cop and he has a sick wife at home with six kids and he is struggling to make ends meet and is thinking about taking some drug money. I think Hawke is a great actor but the character he has here is given a bad New York accent and nothing interesting to do. The women here are either strippers, prostitutes or the thankless wife role. To use a great actress like Lilli Taylor and give her a weak role is a crime and is typical of how women characters are in most films like this. There is a great turn by Ellen Barkin who plays a tough and mean FBI agent but again women are seen as scary and vindictive in this role. I remember when Gere picked gritty roles like his bravura turn as a bad cop in "Internal Affairs" but here he kind of mumbles and sleep walks. What you have here is a boring, lifeless and ordinary cop movie that with the talent involved should have been better than just okay.