First-rate acting drives gritty ‘Finest’

The mean streets don’t get much meaner, not even in movieland.

In director Antoine Fuqua’s dark and gritty cop drama “Brooklyn’s Finest,” three officers with big problems weighing on them walk toward what feels like doom. Blood flows as easily as the street drugs, curse words even easier. Hookers ply their trade, and everybody’s a tough guy, even the women.

In this movie there’s a fine line between the police and the bad guys they chase, which often seems the case in the movies. People aren’t good or bad but different shades of gray.

Eddie (Richard Gere) begins the day with a pull on the whiskey bottle, then points his revolver into his mouth and thinks about it. Eddie is seven days away from retirement, but he gets assigned to show rookies the ropes when all he wants to do is keep his head down and get through the week. Figure the odds.

Sal (Ethan Hawke) is a narc, and a lot of cash is lying around in the world he frequently raids. His wife (Lili Taylor in a too-brief cameo) is pregnant with twins, mold in the house affects her asthma, and Sal can’t afford the down payment on the bigger place he needs for his family. He feels like he can’t move without letting somebody down, so he takes risks.

Tango (Don Cheadle) is undercover in the projects, working the drug dealers and bucking for promotion to detective. Finally, it looks like he’s almost there. But the dealer he’s being asked to set up (Wesley Snipes) just got out of prison, wants to go straight and once saved his life.

A nasty superior officer (Ellen Barkin) is pushing Tango, and his instinct is to push back.

This is the kind of movie where at any moment someone could draw a pistol and blow away the person next to him, then walk away without changing his facial expression.

Fuqua also directed “Training Day,” a movie in a similar vein that earned Denzel Washington a best-actor Oscar as a dirty cop and Hawke a supporting nomination as his newbie partner.

The acting here is just as good, and so is some of the dialogue. But the plot brings the seemingly separate paths of these three police officers to the same place on the same night where everything comes to a head. That feels more like the work of a screenplay writer than a twist of fate.

The picture is worth watching primarily for the individual performances, which are all first-rate.

There’s also a sense of realism in the grimy basements and hallways, the sleazy nightclubs, the dialogue in one-on-one scenes between Gere and his hooker girlfriend, Hawke and his best pal on the force, Cheadle and that ex-dealer he’s thinking of betraying.

It makes you think about the compromises life pushes us toward every day.

It’s not easy to watch, but it does feel like there is some craft and some truth in how this story was put together.

Contact the writer:

444-1269, bob.fischbach@owh.com