Brooklyn’s Finest, Antoine Fuqua’s latest down and dirty cop drama, opens with a line of dialogue that went something like “There’s right and wrong.  Then, there’s righter and wronger.”  The film tries to explore this theory, but in the end it’s just too boring for me to care about ethics or morals or anything other than when the credits are going to roll…

The film follows three separate NYPD officers, and if you’ve watched any other Hollywood movie in the past decade, you know these men are probably going to Crash into each other (see what I did there?).  Don Cheadle plays Tango, an undercover cop who’s spent years getting into the inner circle of a drug ring and is finding his loyalty starting to shift to a criminal (Wesley Snipes) who saved his life in prison.  Richard Gere plays Eddie, an alcoholic cop just a week away from retirement who’s forced to babysit rookie cops who would rather fight crime than ignore it, as he has started to do.  And Ethan Hawke plays Sal, a Catholic cop with five children (and two more on the way) who’s tempted to steal drug money in order to buy his family a larger home.

Those first two stories (undercover cop who’s losing is friends and family, all the while blurring the lines between right and wrong, or the cop just days away from retirement who’s coasting along trying not to get shot) have been done plenty of times, and Fuqua brings little more to either piece of the puzzle.  Hawke’s story seems to be lifted from “The Wire” or “The Shield” (neither of which I’ve ever actually seen) and could have been better had it been given more screen time.  Each plot only gets about 5 minutes before the film shifts to the next story.  There are a few interesting moments where the three stories overlap in a more frenetic manner, but these quick-paced scenes often shift back into the 5 minute segments that just drag on and on.

The film’s opening scene between Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio is by far the film’s best.  It’s a quiet scene with a long opening camera shot that just pans over a car as you hear two men speak.  It left me wondering “What are these two talking about and when will we finally go into the car to see who’s talking?!?”  Eventually, the camera does enter the car where we find Hawke and D’Onofrio discussing the morals of doing right for the wrong reasons or wrong for the right reasons.  When the scene finally ends, it left me with high hopes for the film—I believed the stories were going to be dark, menacing and probably true to life.  Instead, we come across cliché after cliché, but still I held onto my hope that an explosive ending would make it all be worth it.

Speaking of clichés, nothing is more clichéd than the soundtrack here—”The Great Pretender” plays on a jukebox in the first scene where undercover cop Tango meets with his handler (Will Patton); “White Rabbit” plays on a record player when Eddie and his prostitute (Shannon Kane) do drugs; and “Where’s My Money” is blasting out of a stereo when Sal breaks into a drug dealers’ apartment and searches for their cash.  I fully expected “Hallelujah” to make another appearance on film, or something just as cheesy at the end, but slightly spoiler-ific so I won’t mention it here.  I suppose Fuqua (or possibly the Writer or Music Supervisor) felt that the audience wouldn’t understand what was happening without these music cues.  Or maybe they thought they were clever finding such apropos songs for each scene.  Either way, they were wrong; I was angry each time the song lyrics in the background brought me out of the scene as I tried to piece them together with what was going on.

Even though it was sort of fun playing “Match the lyric to the scene,” I kept holding out hope for an explosive ending, where all of our protagonists would meet in one climactic battle.  But sadly (and perhaps not unexpectedly), the ending disappoints.  Instead of a climax where the three stories meet in an all too-clever way, they simply overlap in the same building in an all too-dissatisfying way.  Each officer is inexplicably drawn to the same building in the projects to complete his story arc, but none of them do more than cross paths in the background of one of the others’ shots.  As I sat for nearly two hours, I was hoping for a fantastic ending to save a mediocre film, but instead was given three separate finales that all just happened to take place in the same building at the same time.  Felt more like Brooklyn’s Lamest