A FILM REVIEW OF "BULLET TO THE HEAD" (2013)

Watching the Sylvester Stallone shoot’em up “Bullet to the Head” (**** OUT OF ****) felt like a blast from the past.  This polished but predictable anthology of action movie clichés contains several R-rated, close-quarters, combat scenes with sufficient amounts of blood splatter and gore; some high-octane, fireball explosions; lots of snappy tough guy banter; and surprising displays of frontal female nudity.  Half the scenes reminded me of producer Joel Silver’s explosive, slam-bang, white-knuckled, testosterone-laden tales, such as “Conspiracy Theory,” “Exit Wounds, “Swordfish,” and his “Lethal Weapon” franchise.  Indeed, Silver serves as one of the producers, and “Bullet to the Head” adheres to his formula.  Meanwhile, action auteur Walter Hill drew the other half from his hardboiled melodramas.  For the record, Hill helmed the two “48 Hrs” flicks with Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy, “Extreme Prejudice” with Nick Nolte, “Last Man Standing” with Bruce Willis, and “Red Heat” co-starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Belushi.  Although “The Messenger” scenarist Alessandro Camon adapted the Alexis Nolent graphic novel "Du plomb dans la tête,” “Bullet to the Head” looks like “48 Hrs” and/or “Red Heat” clone.  Mind you, “Bullet to the Head” is Hill’s first theatrical release since his gritty 2002 prison melodrama “Undisputed” with Ving Rhames and Wesley Snipes.  During his absence from the big screen, Hill helmed the premiere episode of HBO’s “Deadwood,” and then the television mini-series western “Broken Trail” (2006) costarring Robert Duvall and Thomas Haden Church.”  In many respects, this action-packed, largely straightforward, odd couple buddy picture compares favorably with earlier, exceptional Stallone sagas like “Assassins,” “The Specialist,” and “Demolition Man.”  Most definitely, it surpasses “Tango and Cash” and “Stop, Or My Mom Will Shoot.”

Cast as a seasoned hit-man in the Crescent City, Sylvester Stallone tangles with a mysterious cabal of Big Easy investors who have the New Orleans Police Department on their payroll.  Director Walter Hill has juggled the occupations of the protagonists from his earlier buddy picture epics.  The cop was always the lead in the combo in the “48 Hrs” movies and “Red Heat.”  This time around, world-weary, career criminal James “Bobo” Bonomo (Sylvester Stallone of “Rocky”) is the lead, while saintly, Washington, D.C. Detective Taylor Kwon (Sung Kang of “Fast & Furious”) behaves rather naively and relies too much on his cell phone.  Ironically, the two men want to exact vengeance for the deaths of their former partners.  They agree to form an uneasy alliance, but Kwon’s conscience prompts him to constrain Bonomo. These two don’t immediately run into each other. When the plot unfolds, Bonomo and his partner Louis Blanchard (Jon Seda of “Bad Boys 2”) masquerade as cops to snuff a cocaine-snorting thug, Hank Greely (Holt McCallany of “Fight Club”), in a motel room.  Bonomo spots a tattooed prostitute cowering in the shower, but he lets her live.  This amoral murderer draws the line at shooting women.  When he is behind the wheel on the road, he swerves to avoid stray cats in front of him.  “It’s bad luck,” he assures Louis.  These two show up at a crowded bar where they are supposed to pick up the balance of their loot for the shooting.  Before either realizes they have been double-crossed, another assassin, Keegan (Jason Momoa of “Conan”), stabs poor Louis repeatedly to death in front of everybody.  He wields a small blade to hack both of Louis’ lungs so nobody in the noisy bar knows a murder has occurred.  Keegan isn’t quite as lucky with Bonomo.  Now, Bonomo wants payback.  Our hero crosses paths with a hard-nosed, Washington, D.C. police detective who is visiting New Orleans.  As it turns out, Hank Greely was his former partner in Washington.  Kwon wants the people who ordered Hank’s demise.  Sure, neither Bonomo nor Kwon have much use for each other initially, but they kind of grow on one other as they survive back-to-back fracases. 

Hill stages some gripping shoot-out scenes that genre fans will savor, and you get to see Silver's trademark Ka-Boom explosions!  Hill never lets the narrative bog down in aimless chatter or an over elaborate plot.  Stallone’s character provides deadpan narration throughout the pyrotechnics so you never take anything seriously in “Bullet to the Head.”  “Bullet to the Head” is not unlike a Tarantino thriller.  Camon and Hill wrap up everything, but leave room for a sequel since the hero’s daughter and the D.C. cop are dating.  At 66 years of age, Sylvester Stallone appears as fit as a fiddle.  This is the kind of movie where guys shed shirts and clash muscles.  He channels a little bit of “Rocky” in his tongue-in-cheek performance.  The ax fight between beefy, muscle-bound Jason Momoa and Stallone has been carefully edited to present both to maximum advantage.  You know Stallone is going to triumph, but Momoa doesn’t make it look easy.  Momoa makes a lusty villain.  No less villainous is Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as a crippled, African investor has no qualms about murder.  Christian Slater appears briefly as a smarmy swindler with a flash drive around his neck that boasts the goods of everybody.  The interrogation scene is pretty amusing.  Clocking in at a lean, mean, 97 minutes, “Bullet to the Head” doesn’t wear out its welcome.  You don’t even have to wait around to see what’s after the end credits so you can clear out early.  Were it not for the pedigree talent involved, “Bullet to the Head” would qualify at best as a three-star rather than a four-star movie.  If you still like Stallone, you'll love "Bullet to the Head" because it is worth shelling out the bucks to watch this Spartan saga.

A FILM REVIEW OF ''GANGSTER SQUAD" (2013)

Most movies give you a chance to get comfortable with their narratives before they hit you with the hard stuff.  “Zombieland” director Rueben Fleischer’s profane, bullet-riddled, urban crime thriller “Gangster Squad” (*** OUT OF ****) cherishes no such illusions.  Early into the action, the arch villain of Angel City—real-life hoodlum legend Mickey Cohen—threads chains around the rear bumpers of two automobiles with an angry out-of-town mobster entangled in a hammock of chains between the cars.  Native Americans saved this ghastly fate for only the most repugnant whites in old movie westerns, except with horses rather than cars.  After a brief conversation, Cohen orders the cars to careen off in different directions.  An aerial long shot depicts the poor dastard as his body bursts apart in the middle.  Indeed, “Gangster Squad” isn’t for everybody.  This suspenseful, often violent, but thoroughly melodramatic law and order epic recounts how an undercover unit of Los Angeles cops fought fire with fire in their war on crime.  They destroyed Cohen’s dreams of turning California into his own private criminal empire.  Movies like “Gangster Squad” used to be the bread and butter for Warner Brothers.  The landmark Burbank studio produced the earliest and most controversial gangster thrillers in the 1930s with the three most memorable stars: James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Humphrey Bogart.

Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Parker (a beefy Nick Nolte of “48 HRS”) summons World War II veteran, Sergeant John O’Mara (Josh Brolin of “Jonah Hex”), because he needs somebody fearless enough to tackle a special assignment.  Lately, Jewish crime figure Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn of “Bad Boys”) has been creating chaos in the City of Angels.  Not only does he own a respected judge, but he has also been cheating on his mobster cronies both in Chicago as well as Los Angeles.  The Chicago mob isn’t happy with Mickey’s behavior.  The King of the Sunset Strip refuses to bow and scrape to the Windy City hoodlums.  He has nothing but contempt for local crime boss Jack Dragna (Jon Polito of “The Big Lebowski”) and orders hits on his life.  At one point, a shoeshine kid dies in an attempt on Dragna’s life.  Cohen has established himself as a warlord, and he refuses to share and share alike with the mob.  Incidentally, for the sake of armchair movie historians, “Gangster Squad” takes place after the demise of Benjamin Siegel, a.k.a. “Bugsy” (1991) with Warren Beatty as the notorious gangster who forged Las Vegas into the gambling capital of America.  At one time, Mickey Cohen worked for Siegel as a henchman.  Two bullets to the head scrapped Siegel’s criminal career in 1947.  “Gangster Squad” opens in 1949 during the rising tensions of the Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.  

Essentially, Chief Parker asks O’Mara to assemble a unit to harass Cohen.  "Don't make arrests," Parker grumbles. "This is occupied territory. Wage guerrilla warfare." O’Mara forms a rainbow-colored “A-Team” consisting of African-American Officer Coleman Harris (Anthony Mackie of “Real Steel”), older white cop, Officer Max Kennard (Robert Patrick of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day”), his Hispanic partner, Officer Navidad Ramirez (Michael Peña of “End of Watch”), Officer Conway Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi of “Ted”), and eventually Sergeant Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling of “Drive”).  One of the first things that they do is plant a bug in Cohen’s house so they can monitor him.  Methodically, these guys shoot up Cohen’s bars, casinos, and disrupt his narcotics traffic.  Wooters takes an interest in Cohen’s girlfriend, Grace Faraday (Emma Stone of “Easy A”), who is supposed to be teaching Mickey etiquette.  True events "inspired" “Gangster Squad,” and this means that Hollywood has taken dramatic license with history.  Actually, the movie is based loosely on Paul Lieberman’s book.  As far as I know, our tall, rugged hero didn’t go toe-to-toe with the considerably shorter Cohen in a public place and beat him to a bloody pulp.  Of course, movies have to be both heroic and confrontational, and "Gangster Squad" possesses both of these attributes. 

This obstreperous, 110-minute, R-rated, shoot’em up doesn’t flinch when it comes to episodes of violence.  Despite the recent bloodbaths both in movie theaters and elementary schools, this standard-issue, old school Warner Brothers release embraces wholesale violence with relish.  Fleischer features fashionable thugs armed with machine guns strafing anybody in sight, including poor white shoeshine boys.  Fleischer stages the action with considerable finesse, and he relies on a charismatic cast to deliver a synthesis of “The Untouchables” with Kevin Costner and “L.A. Confidential” with Russell Crowe.  Despite a plethora of action, largely frontal assault firefights on gritty city streets with .45 caliber Thompson submachine guns, “Gangster Squad” suffers from halfheartedly etched characters, a contrived screenplay by former LAPD homicide investigator and novelist Will Beall, and a numbing sense of predictability.  You can guess what is going to happen before it does, but everybody looks good doing it.  Nevertheless, genre fans should appreciate the studious lengths that the filmmakers have taken to recreate Los Angeles in the late 1940s.  Some of the action was lensed on genuine L.A. locations and enhances the authenticity of the action. Flinty-eyed Josh Brolin makes a sturdy hero, while Ryan Gosling channels Humphrey Bogart.  Sadly, Emma Stone lingerfs on the periphery as the love interest who eventually figures in the demise of Sean Penn’s Mickey Cohen. Penn chews the scenery as Cohen.  No doubt he watched both "Scarface" and "The Untouchables." Altogether, “Gangster Squad” qualifies as a good actioneer, with good performances, and good cinematography.

"TEXAS CHAINSAW 3-D" (2013)

Hollywood loves to teach old dogs new tricks.  Christopher Nolan re-imagined the “Batman” franchise, and Batman will never be that good again.  George Lucas rebooted “Star Wars.”  Now, Disney is preparing a new “Star Wars” trilogy, not to mention a reboot of “The Lone Ranger.”  The people who made the new entry in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” franchise are trying to teach an old chainsaw new tricks.   Numerically, “Texas Chainsaw 3-D” (** OUT OF ****) qualifies as the sixth sequel to Tobe Hooper’s landmark slaughterhouse saga “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974) that alarmed audiences with only half as much blood and twice as much storytelling.  Squeamish people should still avoid this bloodthirsty idiocy.  You get to see a grown man cut in two by a chainsaw-wielding maniac.  This same stout lad saws off feet at the ankles as casually as you would clip your fingernails.  He thrusts living people onto meat hooks and stores half-dead dames in freezers.  Yes, he wears a mask of a dead man's face. 

Basically, “Takers” director John Luessenhop and “Conspiracy” scribes Adam Marcus and Debra Sullivan, along with freshman scenarist Kirsten Elms, have abolished four decades worth of sequels, prequels and remakes.  You don’t need to have seen Tobe Hooper’s follow-up “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2” (1986) with Dennis Hopper to enjoy “Texas Chainsaw 3-D.”  Neither should you worry about Jeff Burr’s “Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990) with Viggo Mortensen.  Or for that matter Kim Henkel’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994) with Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey.  For what it’s worth, Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel created “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” characters.  Let’s not forget “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (2003) that toplined lovely Jessica Biel or “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning” (2006) featuring “The Fast and the Furious” dame Jordana Brewster. Indeed, Luessenhop and his writers ask us to consider “Texas Chainsaw 3-D” as the new official sequel to the 1974 film.

Sounds like somebody got their chainsaws tangled up.  Not surprisingly, the opening credits occur against excerpts from the Hooper original.  Some actors and actresses reprise their roles, notably Gunnar Hansen, who once played Leatherface but portrays Boss Sawyer, and Marilyn Burns, cast Sally Hardesty in the original.  The filmmakers beg our indulgence when it comes to a realistic timetable, too.  This “sequel” doesn’t take place until 18 to 25 years later in the 1990s. Nevertheless, "Texas Chainsaw 3-D" looks contemporary.  Talk about stretching time out!   Luessenhop and company make a huge leap of faith.  In the process, they give us something far more horrifying than just another gore-soaked sequel.  “Texas Chainsaw 3” amounts to a revisionist sequel!  In the 1950s, for example, Hollywood rehabilitated Indian savages and converted them noble and sympathetic warriors wronged by society.  Essentially, “Texas Chainsaw 3-D” treats the murderous Leatherface character with the same compassion that westerns conferred on Indians in movies like “Broken Arrow,” “Apache,” and “Run of the Arrow.”  One scene near the end of “Texas Chainsaw 3-D” presents a tableaux with Leatherface and his only surviving relative that reminded me of George and Lenny from the classic 1939 movie “Of Mice and Men.”  This John Steinbeck movie concerned a mentally challenged brute and his intelligent guardian.  Horror has a new identity!

Altered time-lines or not, our heroine, Heather Miller (Alexandra Daddario of “The Babysitters”), carves up meat at a meat packing factory.  Little does she know what runs in the family.  When she isn’t at work, Heather spends quality time with her African-American lover, Ryan (Tremaine "Trey Songz" Neverson), who isn’t above cheating on her.  In fact, he cheats on her with her own best friend.  Bombshell of a babe Nikki ( Tania Raymonde of“Wild Cherry”), has no fear of being caught by Heather and does everything but flaunt their affair in front of her.  Moreover, Nikki has her own boyfriend, Kenny (Keram Malicki-Sánchez of “American History X”), who preoccupies himself with his culinary skills.  This quartet cruises off to Newt, Texas, in a van after Heather learns she has received an inheritance from a long, lost relative who she didn’t know she had.  Along the way to Newt, the quartet pick up a hitchhiker in the rain, Darryl (Shaun Sipos of “Rampage”), who has a secret case of sticky fingers that comes back to doom him.  When they arrive at the house on Homestead Road, grandma's lawyer, Farnsworth (Richard Riehle of “Office Space”) meets them, but declines to accompany them after they proceed through the gates onto the premises.

Heather is still reeling from the revelation that the couple who raised her weren’t her biological parents.  The father rescued her from the clutches of a dying woman when the Sawyers were gunned down by vigilantes and their home burned to the ground.  Anyway, the realtor hands Heather a letter and advises her to read it.  Naturally, Heather ignores the letter when her friends and she discover that this is no ordinary house but a palatial mansion with many rooms.  Curiosity leads to carnage when the man in the basement, none other than Leatherface (Dan Yeager of “Metal Heads”) himself, comes up to investigate and begins carving flesh.  He cuts his way through a number of people before he realizes that blood is thicker than chainsaws.  Heather grovels at his mercy as she was herself about to be slaughtered by the evil town mayor who precipitated an orgy of violence that brought her back to her destiny.

The switching chainsaws plot of “Texas Chainsaw 3-D” is imaginative stuff but this doesn’t happen until half-way through the mayhem.  Nevertheless, before the villain is rehabilitated, several people have joined the ranks of the dead.  The best scene—again out of any chronological time-line—has a curious deputy sheriff walking through the mansion following the smeared trail of blood with his wrists crossed.  He holds a pistol in one fist and an iPhone in the other, documenting his progress through the house down into the cellar where he encounters bodies carved up in all shapes.  Luessenhop generates a moderate amount of suspense and buckets of blood and gore, but “Texas Chainsaw 3-D” cannot cut it as the classic that the original was.

FILM REVIEW OF ''DEFENDOR" (Canadian-2008)

Serio-comic movies about ordinary Joes who don costumes and behave like superheroes are quickly becoming a dime a dozen. John Ritter played a struggling actor in “Hero-At-Large” (1980) who thwarted a robbery while wearing a Captain Avenger costume for a movie that he was hired to promote. Crackpot inventor Damon Wayans suited up as a super hero in “Blankman” (1994) after he created a bulletproof wardrobe. The 2006 indie feature “Special” saw Michael Rapaport of “True Romance” as a nobody police traffic-ticket writing cop named Les who participates in an experimental study for new antidepressant medication named Specioprin Hydrochloride. Rapaport becomes delusional and believes he can levitate himself off his sofa and penetrate walls without injury. Freshman Canadian writer & director Peter Stebbings has woven a similar but insightful yarn along these lines, “Defendor” (*** OUT OF ****), about a mentally challenged chap (Woody Harrelson) who believes that he is bullet-proof and tries to clean up his hometown. He targets a ruthless Serbian gangster as his nemesis that he nicknames ‘Captain Industry.’ Unlike its predecessors, “Defendor” unfolds as a straightforward crime movie with a hero who is truly deluded from the start and the villains are genuine thugs who want to terminate our hero with extreme prejudice. Along the way, Stebbings contributes some interesting ideas about the psychology of an individual who puts his life on the line to help others. Mind you, none of the aforementioned characters remotely resemble high profile vigilante crime busters like “Batman,” “The Green Hornet,” and their ilk. Captain Avenger, Blankman, and Les aren’t millionaire philanthropists or acrobats. The idea of a guy dressing up to curb crime is far from original; Republic Film studios made their share of serials about these crime fighters in the 1940s, but Stebbings isn’t out to ridicule his hero. Although the hero of “Defendor” is incompetent, what he stands for provides him with a wealth of dignity.

Arthur Poppington (Woody Harrelson of “Zombieland”) is a lowly, inconsequential city employee. He is the kind of guy that you sometimes see at roadway construction sites who holds a two-sided traffic sign with STOP on one side and SLOW on the other. During the day, he is unassuming Arthur. After dark he decks himself out in a black outfit, a SWAT-style helmet with mini-lights and a camera connected to a portable VHS recorder on his back and tries to battle crime. Arthur doesn’t have a Bat Cave or a Fortress of Solitude, but he feels called upon to defend the defenseless. His mother left him when he was an adolescent and he never knew his father. Meanwhile, his one-armed grandfather, who fought in World War I, explains that Arthur’s mother, Fay (Charlotte Sullivan of “Fever Pitch”), died using illegal drugs. Arthur’s objective is to eliminate the drug dealers that deprived him of his mother. Our hero’s morality springs from his obsession with comic books such as “G.I. Joe.” Meantime, Arthur’s costume is wholly improvised; right down to the capital-letter D that he duct-tapes onto the front of his outfit. The arsenal that he relies on consists of a slingshot, marbles, lime juice--he squints this into the eyes of his adversaries, wasps, and a World War I trench club. Arthur believes that men who wield firearms are cowards. People who call him ‘Defender’ really infuriate Arthur, and he stipulates that his name ends with an ‘or’ rather than an ‘er.’ As you can easily imagine, Arthur is neither shrewd nor courageous. Actually, he believes that he is bulletproof!

Writer & director Stebbings has taken an estimated budget of $3.5 million and helmed a film that looks incredibly sophisticated and generates loads of atmosphere for our underdog hero. Despite this miniscule budget, Stebbings orchestrates events so that the film achieves a level of modest complexity. The narrative leaps and lunges back and forth in time to flesh out our protagonist while propelling the film along its formulaic path. Anybody who attempts to perform superheroic deeds has got to be delusional and “Defendor” opens with Arthur undergoing a court ordered psychiatric evaluation. Again, the action goes into flashback mode, and we learn how Arthur embarked on his crime fighting odyssey. Arthur’s first encounter occurs when he assaults an undercover policeman, Chuck Dooney (Elias Koteas of “The Fourth Kind”), who has a rendezvous with a crack-smoking prostitute named Angel (Kat Dennings of “Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist”) in a remote part of Hammertown. Defendor roughs Dooney up and the police arrest Defendor. Captain Fairbanks (Clark Johnson of “S.W.A.T.”) chats with Arthur and then releases him, but refuses to return the trench tool. Nevertheless, in that rare display of superheroism, Defendor confiscates the weapon that the police took away from him. Defendor has a Houdini-like ability to show up and vanish as if he were never where he was.

Later, Defendor defends a graffiti artist from Dooney and his henchmen, but the henchmen catch up with Defendor and beat him to a pulp. Nearby in the shadows, puffing away on her crack pipe stands Angel. She tries to revive Defendor, and Stebbings cross-cuts between Angel trying to revive him to Arthur as an adolescent (Max Dreesen of “The Jazzman”) being awakened by his drug-addicted mother who tells him that she is going away. Anyway, Angel and Arthur become friends and she hangs out with him at a dilapidated city garage that nobody uses any more where our hero hangs his hat. Arthur’s only other friend is Paul Carter (Michael Kelly of “Law Abiding Citizen”) who serves as a City Public Works supervisor. Paul and Arthur share a bond; Arthur saved Paul’s son from being struck by a car. After Arthur is arrested for assaulting Kat’s father, the judge allows Arthur to live with Paul rather than face prison. The catch, however, is Arthur cannot don his Defendor outfit. Of course, Arthur cannot accommodate the court when the villains snatch Kat to keep Arthur silent. You see Arthur knows when the slime-ball villains headed up by Kristic (Alan C. Peterson of “Shooter”) are expecting a container of guns and girls from Odessa. Before Arthur can rescue Kat, she rescues herself when the perverted corrupt cop Dooney tries to force her to have sexual relations with him and she shoots him in the genitals. The finale when Defendor crashes the pier with his bucket truck, loosens swarms of wasps and marbles is something to see!

Apart from its tragic ending, “Defendor” qualifies as a good movie that is evenly paced.

FILM REVIEW OF ''BROOKLYN'S FINEST'' (2010)

“Training Day” director Antoine Fuqua’s new bullet-riddled NYPD thriller “Brooklyn’s Finest” (** OUT OF ****) suffers from too much irony. Three seasoned New York City policemen struggle against forces beyond their control to ensure their survival, promote the prosperity of their family, or live by code of loyalty. Indeed, this gritty urban shoot’em up, starring Richard Gere, Ethan Hawke, Don Cheadle and Wesley Snipes, recycles the usual inventory of clichés about the boys-in-blue both on and off the beat. The origins of multi-storied police procedurals like “Brooklyn’s Finest” can be traced to either those post-Watergate, Joseph Wambaugh-inspired law and order street epics, such as director Richard Fleischer’s “The New Centurions” (1972) and director Robert Aldritch’s “The Choirboys” (1977) or director Sidney Lumet’s police yarns, including “The Anderson Tapes” (1970), “Serpico” (1973), and “Prince of the City” (1981) Predictable, disillusioning, even humorless, this Overture Films release manages to surpass earlier convoluted cop dramas such as “Pride & Glory” (2008) with William Norton and “We Own the Night” (2007) with Mark Wahlberg. Not only do the protagonists in “Brooklyn’s Finest” radiate minimal charisma, but also the cops in supporting roles appear nothing less than incompetent. One guns down a fellow cop by mistake. A rookie cop dies in the line-of-duty and other rookie botches an arrest and kills an African-American youth. While he musters enough momentum to keep this 125 minute cops versus drug dealers saga crackling along at a brisk clip, Fuqua cannot compensate for “Sleeper Cell” scenarist Michael C. Martin’s lackluster narrative that delivers virtually no surprises. Mind you, there are a couple of jolts that will catch you off guard, but good as they are they do not salvage this film. Worse, parts of “Brooklyn’s Finest” emerge as incoherent, and Fuqua never gives us a chance to warm up to the characters. This is not the kind of cop movie that lures in recruits. Technically, this proficiently produced chronicle about crime busters in the Big Apple paints law enforcement in ignoble colors.

“Brooklyn’s Finest” chronicles the lives of three NYPD cops. The action opens with Sal (Ethan Hawke of “Training Day”) chatting one evening with a criminal, Carlo (Vincent D'Onofrio of “Full Metal Jacket”), in a sedan near a cemetery. We learn Sal is an overworked, underpaid tactical narcotics cop with a growing Catholic family. Not only does he have three children, but also his asthmatic wife, Angela (Lili Taylor of “High Fidelity”), who is suffering from wood mold, is pregnant with twins. Worse, Sal’s house is too small for his brood and he is struggling on a cop’s salary to make ends meet. Of course, the ends don’t meet for Sal and he turns to crime. He kills gangsters for their illicit money and he ponders taking money from drug busts, but his misguided, well-intentioned partner tries to get him not to. Sal is desperately trying to come up with enough cash to get his family into a bigger house. White-haired Eddie (Richard Gere of “Internal Affairs”) awakens in bed alone at the start of a new day and practices suicide by jamming his service revolver into his mouth. He is seven days away from retirement and universally reviled by members of his own department because he has descended into the depths of alcoholism. Eddie does his best to keep out of action. He has been beating the mean streets of Brooklyn so long that he has lost his desire to be a cop. He finds himself stuck with mentoring rookie cops and he cannot stand their enthusiasm or their inexperience. Finally, Tango (Don Cheadle of “Traitor”) is an undercover narcotics officer who is separated from his wife. Tango has been undercover so long that he is beginning to think like a mobster. He pleads with his liaison, Lt. Bill Hobarts (Will Patton of “The Fourth Kind”), to take him off the streets. In fact, Tango served a stretch in prison as an undercover cop and bonded with a big-time gangster Caz (Wesley Snipes of “Blade: Trinity”) with whom he sympathizes because the gangster has been given so many wrong deals. The upper echelon want to arrest Caz and send him back to jail and they call on Tango to inform on the man who saved his life while in prison. Tango refuses to help them, especially a tough-as-nail female cop, Agent Smith (Ellen Barkin of “Ocean's Thirteen”), who is prepared to exhaust every possibility to put Caz back behind bars and perhaps even worse.

Director Antoine Fuqua and scenarist Michael C. Martin carefully build the pressure with which these cops have to contend. Ironically, these guys run into each other occasionally during the action, but they are not acquainted with each other in any way. For example, Eddie and a rookie cop are entering a store when Tango emerges. They nudge each other and you can see Tango’s hackles rise. Tango is so messed up that he contemplates killing a couple of New Jersey State Troopers in one scene. Eddie struggles with the two rookie cops that he trains to stay calm under pressure, but they cannot control themselves. Like Tango, Sal has gone too far and searches for opportunities to take advantage of drug dealers, gun them down, and appropriate their cash, but he never seems to be able to acquire enough cash to buy his dream house. Unfortunately, when the pressure cooker of tension explodes in the last quarter hour, audiences get no relief and little closure from the outcome. Fuqua and Martin spent more time moralizing about the fate of these three than entertaining us with snappy action scenes. Ironically, everything works out, like the initial dialogue between Carlo and Sal about the warped way that wrongs making rights and rights making wrongs. What little closure “Brooklyn’s Finest” provides at fade-out is not enough to make you feel good. Instead, this handsomely produced, atmospheric, well-acted cop drama brings you down more often than it gives you a boost.