Buy posters from this movie

Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix) runs a Brooklyn nightclub for some cuddly Russian gangsters; the kind that still plays a steady rotation of Blondie and affords him time to pull down Eva Mendes’ dress in his office. She plays Amada Juarez, the loyal girlfriend enjoying her expensive wardrobe courtesy of Bobby. Joseph Grusinsky (Mark Wahlberg) has a Polish name, but he’s really Bobby’s brother and a police officer to boot; one who’s rising in the department much to the honor of their chief of police father, Bert (Robert Duvall). Joseph warns Bobby that he’s about to hit his financiers hard, starting with nailing nightclub regular, Vadim Mezshinski (Alex Veadov), the biggest drug dealer in town.

Bobby dismisses his warnings and after Joseph leads a raid on his club during primetime, his brother is targeted for execution; an action that forces Bobby to choose sides. Dad isn’t keen on getting another son hurt and is half-heartedly dismissive in Bobby wiring up and informing on his partners. Good thing they have different last names and no one has any idea he’s connected to the law. By blood, no less. Those stealthy polacks. Reminds me of the old joke I just made up – How does a polack go undercover? He covers up his badge.

We Own the Night seems to be mining for all sorts of revenge-inducing emotions with diamond-incrusted sides of reconciliation and violent ambushes of action. Writer/director James Gray, whose previous films were the nothing-to-write-home-about family crime sagas Little Odessa and The Yards (also with Phoenix & Wahlberg) has managed to digress as a storyteller though, hoping maybe that his actors’ presence will be enough to overlook how little he has. The screenplay reaches near-laughable turns such as when Bobby all of a sudden goes from some deputized officer right out of a western to training for the real thing, which in the course of the film’s running time looks easier than getting a GED. Then again, any police force who can’t seem to hold on to Vadim after nabbing him twice and watching him escape the second time (which we never get to watch, only hear about), is probably a two-week course anyway.

After making such an Oscar-nominated impression in The Departed, Wahlberg’s off-switch appears to be on again. It helps that he spends most of the film unconscious in the hospital, but when he emerges again for the finale Gray takes this moment to introduce a little phobia about getting shot. This gives Phoenix the opportunity for his walk-through-hell moment which by the time it comes means nothing to us other than as a visual motif whose temperature is well hotter than the cold shoulder we’ve been delivered in the drama and suspense department. Even the film’s one visually arresting sequence, a rainy car chase, is diluted by the familiarity of the situation and our lack of surprise at its outcome.

Conventionality is the dark cloud hovering over We Own the Night and there’s no light shining to make this even a passable crime actioner like the forthcoming (and more ambitious) American Gangster. It’s not a throwback that’s the cause celebre recently in films like that and David Fincher’s Zodiac unless you’re taking the more literal translation of throwback. If Scorsese’s infiltrating cops-and-crooks epic is the modern tops and Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is the skillfully made if been-there/done-that middle ground, then James Gray’s We Own the Night is well at the back of the bouncer’s line where people who don’t own a damn thing stand idly and never make it in.

link directly to this review at http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=16762&reviewer=198
originally posted: 10/12/07 00:00:00
 printer-friendly format