New York City, 1988. Ally manager Bobby Green (Phoenix) hasn?t told his criminal associates that his fellow-man Joe (Wahlberg) and father Burt (Duvall) are prestigious policemen. When Joe is seriously injured, Bobby resolves to bring up his battle.
Penny-a-liner-director James Gray has only made three films to date - Little Odessa in 1994, The Yards in 2000, and any more We Own The Night. His habitual area is organised crime with a side-disposition of menage melodrama and the outer boroughs of New York City. Similar to Little Odessa, this is set in Brooklyn’s Brighton Margin, home to a large Russian community (and, for that reason, the Russian Mafia), but it’s surprisingly shaky on the specifics of its 1980s setting. The major locale is a massive discotheque, which seems as if it should be in Manhattan in the 1970s, and the real influx of Russian organised crime came with the fall of the Soviet Union, a few years after this is set. Meanwhile, the cops-and-crooks angle leaps back beyond precise the 1970s Sidney Lumet movies Gray would be to evoke, to trot out clichés just about brothers on opposite sides that were hackneyed in the 1930s.
Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg, stars of The Yards, have both come a long mode since their last Gray teaming, but sadly take a gradation back here. Phoenix shoulders the film as the superabundant son of the the fuzz family, who enjoys his spell as a coke-snorting party-fixer but turns true blue when a fiendish baddie puts his brother in the hospital, while Wahlberg is stuck with a straightforwardly-arrow discomfort-in-the-ass cop role that requires him to sit out a in general stretch of the movement (and a last-quote development which would be interesting if it weren’t thrown away). Eva Mendes is stuck with the most thinly conceived role as Phoenix’s hot-tamale trophy girlfriend, who starts grumbling when he has to pain back on his co-signatory lifestyle and gets increasingly
fed-up with his family dramas. Coextensive with reliable Robert Duvall, playing in the future another crusty patriarch, doesn’t influence a rear much to an entirely ordinary role.
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Gray has a touch with contrived but suspenseful action sequences - here, a car chase/murder attempt on dangerous roads in driving rain, and a climactic loot on the Russian Crowd which involves hunting through a field of burning reeds. But too often he defaults to unwieldy dollops of soap operatics - the three male leads forever snarl recriminations at each other up front tragedies exemplar to manly tears, vows of fiercely and frankly unbelievable design twists. Though as obscure and humourless a melodrama as they come, it can’t reach an agreement over a mid-film tumescence as an unbelievable show development comes outdoors of left-field and sidelines any notion of brave, on-the-streets credibility. This sort of concerns b circumstances might pit oneself against in the context of one of those Hong Kong snatch-in-the-draught-with-a-gun-blasting-
in-each-jointly pictures, but it can’t be shoehorned into a movie that way wants to take house in the real world. If the New York Police Department surely worked like this, they’d be as terrifying as the Mob they’re intended to be taking down.
Even allowed the unlikeliness of the set-up, the film doesn’t deliver anything like credible emotional drama. We can tell from a handful of Duvall’s barks why the star would want to change his superstar and become a semi-crook, but Phoenix is asked to render a oddball arc that stretches the patience - and only really takes live dangerously in a scene where he turns on his one-time best familiar, a good-time lampoon who has helped set him up for yet another bungled club.
This just can?t fight in an arena with the likes of The Departed - which at least makes a point of its contrived storyline - let slip merely the high watermark set for cops vs. drugs drama by the TV series The Wire.