In the same way -- well, sort of -- that good pitching beats good hitting, good acting will overcome a mediocre script. Case in point: The brothers-on-opposite-sides-of-the-law drama We Own the Night.
With the possible exception of Eva Mendes (who gives, nonetheless, possibly the best performance of her slight career), pretty much everybody in this overheated New York cop story is better than the lines they have to utter. In fact, every role is so much in each actor's wheelhouse, it's practically batting practice.
No one epitomizes this more than Joaquin Phoenix, who plays Bobby Green, a manic, coked-out nightclub manager whose police-chief dad (Robert Duvall, playing the Great Santini with a badge) hates everything about his black-sheep son's lifestyle, from the drugs to the Puerto Rican girlfriend (Mendes). I mean, to find his muse, Phoenix really only needs to think back as far as his last stint in rehab.
The tightly wound Mark Wahlberg plays Bobby's tightly wound brother Joe Grusinsky, a career cop and NYPD legacy who considers his brother's abandonment of the family "business" to be a shunning offence.
It all takes place in a 1988 New York where people listened mainly to disco and '70s album rock and where cops were apparently gunned down at a rate of at least one a day in Baghdad-like open warfare between drug dealers and the good guys. All I can say is, I really lucked out in the New York neighbourhoods I hung out in back then.
The dissolute Bobby wears his exile proudly, like a badge of dishonour.
That is, until Joe is mortally wounded in a "hit" by a Russian mobster who happens to frequent Bobby's club, likes him and doesn't know he's the chief's son. All of a sudden, the blood thickens and Bobby turns informant and sees the error of his ways faster than St. Paul on the road to Damascus.
The fact that Phoenix still acts crazy and sweaty even as he's going "straight" saves this emotional seachange from looking as phony as it should.
There's one very good car chase in the rain and a weirdly out-of-place foot-chase in an overgrown meadow that looks like a scene from Children of the Corn (none of the Russian mobsters are really very scary -- in fact We Own the Night has the rare distinction of boasting "good guys" who are far more menacing than the villains).
Director/writer James Gray evokes a deadly serious tone not far removed from his last major effort, the also New York-based The Yards (which also starred Wahlberg and Phoenix).
The tone is contagious, and makes We Own the Night a diverting enough time-wasting thriller -- even if it doesn't hold up that well when you're hashing it out later over coffee.
(This film is rated 18-A)
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