EMPIRE AVENUE, PARK CITY
Grabbing a quick lunch following the world premier screening of Antoine Fuqua’s newest film, “Brooklyn’s Finest.” The film is a return to a familiar genre for Fuqua and could, in many ways, be pitched as the New York version of “Training Day.” Here once again we find ourselves in a gritty, raw world of cops and crooks with lines constantly blurred between the two. Ultimately it’s a story of corruption and attempted redemption for three unconnected Brooklyn cops who find it necessary to take the law into their own hands. As writer Michael Martin put it during the Q&A, it’s essentially “one story told three times.” Sure, on paper the basic premise seems a bit cliché, but Fuqua as you’d expect finds plenty of ways to bring the concept to a brutal reality. The end point is that there are plenty of cases where there’s no such things as right or wrong – as Martin put it, “nothing is ever black or white, but shades of grey.” He continued saying that the script was all about “complexity and levels” as a way to “see behind the [murder] headlines” to get a glimpse of the decisions and situations that lead up to something going horribly wrong. Without Denzel Washington, the film doesn’t carry quite the emotional punch of Training Day, but the cast, including Ethan Hawke, Don Cheadle, Wesley Snipes and Richard Gere (playing against type), all pull strong performances.
This is classic Fuqua, so if you like his style of brutal realism in service of story, then this film is for you. Those not comfortable with people getting gunned down at close range, then “Brooklyn’s Finest” is not a film you’re likely to get very far through.
~Gunther
