Fuqua's Finest

Brooklyn’s Finest debuted at the #8 spot on March 5, 2010. The next week it remained at the #8 spot. The third week of its release it dropped out of the Top 10 as the slots were filled with Alice in Wonderland, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, The Bounty Hunter, Repo Men, She’s Out of My League, and still, Avatar. This is a travesty. I saw Brooklyn’s Finest three days ago and I can’t stop thinking about it.

The film is directed by Antoine Fuqua, who directed 2001’s Training Day, which garnered an Academy Award for Denzel Washington. In the nine years since Mr. Fuqua has, regrettably, given us some lackluster movies such as Tears of the Sun, King Arthur and Shooter. Only Mr. Fuqua can say why he made these movies after the success of Training Day. But Brooklyn’s Finest is on a level all by itself. It is Antoine Fuqua’s best movie to date, and in my humble opinion, is better than any movie playing in American theaters. Before I discuss what Brooklyn’s Finest is, let me take a few moments to say what it is not. The film is not another rehash of cops and drug dealers, a violent urban drama about how good guys have nothing while bad guys have everything. It goes beyond that and takes no easy way out.

The story focuses on three different cops and the toll that wearing the badge has on their lives. Ethan Hawke is Sal, a narcotics officer with five children and a pregnant wife expecting twins. Their house has wood mold, which threatens the life and lungs of his family, but Sal—a devoted Catholic—cannot even afford back rent, much less a new home to provide for the health of his wife and children. He is tempted beyond temptation to keep some of the drug money he and his team find on their raids. Sal redefines desperate.

Richard Gere plays Eddie, a 22-year veteran street cop, who only has seven days left on the force, and he can’t wait. He rationalizes his time not in years or even weeks, but in days. As he says, a day of robbery, a day of beatings, a day of rape; the cop has 22 years of days. Seven days never seemed so long. The first scene we have of Eddie is morning, when he wakes on his unsheeted mattress and no pillow; he sits up, waits, grabs a revolver, puts it in his mouth and pulls the trigger. Click. One more day on the streets of Brooklyn.

Don Cheadle is Tango, a cop so deep undercover that he has befriended both sides of the warring local drug gangs including Caz (Wesley Snipes), a dealer he met in prison years earlier while doing another undercover job. But Caz saved his life in prison, and Tango feels obliged to keep Caz safe on the streets. But Tango’s bosses want Caz, and if they get him Tango gets a promotion, a substantial raise and a desk job off the streets of Brooklyn.

Brooklyn’s Finest is a violent urban drama, but what separates it from the seemingly endless clones that fill video rental shelves is that nothing is glorified—including the drug dealers—and each character must make moral choices that are not easy. Sal is confronted with the fact that drug money gets caught up in the legal system and doesn't go to the cops who stopped it, who need it, who don’t make enough as public servants to provide for a family. Eddie does his job without thanks, and two decades of confronting the violence of the streets—more than 7,000 days worth—takes its toll physically and emotionally. Tango is torn between doing what is legally right and what is morally right. And by the end of the movie, all three of these cops will end up in the same apartment building in the middle of the night.

Most movies barely have one character as complex as the main characters in this film. This movie offers no easy answers; it does not try to answer them, and in my opinion that’s what makes the film appealing. The movie is exceptional on every level: Acting by Hawke, Gere, Cheadle and Snipes; the screenplay by Michael C. Martin and Fuqua’s direction. In fact, I was reminded several times of Crash (which also featured a wonderful performance by Cheadle), and that film won three Academy Awards including Best Picture of 2006. Brooklyn’s Finest will have been out on DVD several months by the time the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominate films and crew for the “Oscars.” Hopefully, they will remember this one.