Gangsta Epoch

Brooklyn’s Finest

Directed by Antoine Fuqua

Runtime: 140 min.

EVER SINCE PRESIDENT OBAMA gave a shout out to The Wire, it’s been impossible for popular culture to portray the African-American experience as anything other than ghetto crime stereotype. Obama’s validation of racist clichés explains the lousy new Antoine Fuqua movie Brooklyn’s Finest, which merges police corruption and African-American fatalism. We’re meant to enjoy this overlong exploration of how three cops interact in the urban chaos as if it were a grand explanation for all that’s gone wrong in big city life, that is, a big-screen version of HBO’s The Wire.

After being kicked off American Gangster (replaced by the more stylish hack, Ridley Scott), director Fuqua purposely steps up his usual trite game with the portentous Brooklyn’s Finest. Now he’s made his own gangsta epic featuring a parade of characters and elaborate crime-in-the-city montages—this time from Five-O’s perspective. It’s a selfproduced variation on the crooked cop, black pathology of Fuqua’s 2000 hit Training Day. Ethan Hawke plays Sal, a cop sneaking cash from drug busts to move his wife and four kids into a better house. Richard Gere plays Eddie, an apathetic detective counting down his last week before retirement. Don Cheadle plays Tango, an undercover narc trying to protect a bro from da hood.They’re all cynics and semi-corrupted, tempted by the prevalence of murder and deceit to do the wrong thing.That’s also what Fuqua has done. By stepping up his game, Fuqua’s gone from his usual bullcrap to horsehockey.

Inspired by the flash and bravado of action flicks, blaxploitation and hip-hop, Fuqua disgraces the black American cultural sensibility. He shows an adolescent’s sense of seriousness in the way Brooklyn’s Finest reduces moral dilemma to gunplay, drugs and machismo. Apparently, that’s what Fuqua envied about GoodFellas. (Scorsese is the progenitor of the modern gangster movie’s ugliest cliché.) But is that all he got out of the equally serious Black Caesar, Gordon’s War and New Jack City? Fuqua diminishes the crime genre’s depiction of American ambition and urban sorrow; he misreads the reason urban males traditionally favor the form.

Opening with a murder scene—where Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio discuss “not right and wrong, but righter and wronger”—Fuqua and screenwriter Michael C. Martin distort the complexities of modern male trust and responsibility.They use an over-fantasized scenario featuring hyperbolic danger and histrionic characterizations.Taking a cue from cynical hip-hop, Fuqua and Martin posit corruption before they posit law. A naive kid or showbiz con artist might define the world through ghetto deprivation, but this skepticism doesn’t credibly depict what motivates cop characters. Fuqua uses Hollywood commercial strategies, not psychology. His cop heroes don’t represent the futility and wish for power that gangster movies normally provide; heroizing rogue cops perverts the audience’s desire for moral order—which was the rebellious reason hip-hop audiences cheered gangster-heroes. The last good example of ambivalent heroics was Wayne Kramer’s Running Scared.

Fuqua betrays the urban moviegoing tradition by denying its essential values. No doubt this fake realism comes from The Wire—it’s the new standard of blaxploitation recently endorsed by President Obama— where there’s no such thing as average, lawabiding African Americans. So Brooklyn’s Finest preferences its white cops. Hawke and Gere embody basic moral predicaments— and, really, the film runs smoothly when showing the complicated ironies of Hawke’s and Gere’s desperate screw-ups—while Cheadle’s subplot leads to an avalanche of thug clichés. (Tango’s sketchy private life features a Manhattan Neverland penthouse.)

In a brief role,Wesley Snipes plays Cos, Tango’s ex-con best friend, and momentarily infuses the movie with startling moral authority. Like his superbly conflicted fighter in Walter Hill’s Undisputed, Snipes shows knowledge of life experience. Snipes avoids cliché with a magnificent look of weariness that might include impatience with even Fuqua’s warped fantasies. Cos returns to the ghetto and views it with one slightly-closing eyelid. His thinking and remorse are visible, palpable—everyone else in the film is overacting.

Clearly, Fuqua doesn’t appreciate what Snipes contributes—a portrait of solid, obsidian, tragic virtue—because the film ends up glorifying the ludicrous violence that Cos abhors. Fuqua’s climactic battle between good and evil pits Gere against two grossly menacing, even satanic, ghetto thugs. After indulging the type of urban-ethnic chaos featured in Sidney Lumet’s worst cop flicks, this is how Fuqua balances Hollywood’s racial ledgers. Brooklyn’s Finest perpetuates the new “post-racial” conventions that glue non-white characters to the worst depredations of the past.This occasions liberal condescension in movies from Precious to France’s A Prophet and keeps any other depiction of non-white lives off screen. Attempting to make a great ghetto epic, Fuqua has made a hot ghetto mess.