If I were to say to you I’ve got a cop drama starring Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke, and Wesley Snipes that takes place in Brooklyn and is directed by the guy who did Training Day you’d probably think I had a pretty good movie for you to watch, right? On those merits alone it should be a solid, if not necessarily stellar, movie. It’s a good cast, in a great setting, and it’s dealing with the same type of world that Training Day took place in, and that was a great movie that won Denzel an Oscar. Sounds good, right? Unfortunately Antonine Fuqua’s latest directorial effort is another in a series of passable at best feature films.
Cribbing just a little bit from better films like Crash and Traffic, Finest follows three different and seemingly separate plotlines that center around men in or tied to the Brooklyn Police force. The problem with Finest is that, unlike Crash or Traffic, the varying plots never tie together in any sort of satisfactory or revelatory way. There is a passing attempt at having the main characters interact, but it literally comes down to something like Richard Gere bumping into Don Cheadle on his way out of a convenience store. That’s it. That’s all the intertwining we get from an audience standpoint, and that’s pretty meager.
Beyond the complete lack of interconnectivity, none of the characters in the movie have any redeeming features to speak of. There is little to no effort put into making the audience care about anyone they see on screen. Consequently, when things start to go south for everyone, we as the audience don’t particularly care. Is it a shame that Ethan Hawke has a pregnant wife and three kids at home living in a house that has a toxic mold problem? Sure it is, but we barely see those characters, and he’s such a shady character that when things start to go sour we can’t really feel for him. Is it unfortunate that Don Cheadle is going through an apparently messy divorce? Yep, but again, we never see her character and he’s not exactly the most savory of guys so why do we care about it? Why does the nature of his divorce get any screen time at all? We don’t even know why he’s getting divorced. I guess we could assume that his commitment to the job has led to the divorce, but it’s never even given lip service. He could just say, “Hey you know this job already cost me my marriage!” and then we’d at least have that much backstory but no, it doesn’t happen.
To be honest, the necessity of Wesley Snipes’s character is almost a complete mystery. I guess we are supposed to assume that he is a complete bad guy street hustling gang banger, but we never see any of that in the movie so why is he in there at all? Why make allusions to him being such a badass if you’re never going to make good on them? What’s the point? Furthermore there is no consistency whatsoever with his character. One moment he’s making a choice that would have you believe he’s turned over a new leaf and has renounced his (alluded to) violent past, and the next he’s moving full steam ahead with a big drug buy. For a guy not wanting to risk breaking his parole how does buying 10 bricks of pure heroin fit into that picture exactly? There are instances like these shot through the whole movie, characters make appearances or statements that have little or no bearing on the story being told. They just take up screen time, while at the same time I felt like some of the crucial backstory and exposition might have been left on the editing room floor. I’d be curious to see what the Director’s Cut of the flick will look like, but I don’t think I’m willing to subject myself to it again.
One thing I will give the movie credit for, it does a good job at painting the world that these men live and work in. It’s a dark, mean, gross place and these men have been beaten down by the continual onslaught of despair that’s present in their everyday existence. Richard Gere is just a guy who’s trying to make it to his retirement, and you feel for him at points. But in “just trying to make it to retirement” his character makes some pretty cowardly choices for 90% of the movie, so once again he doesn’t engender much good will. (Never mind the plots of the 2 rookies he gets paired with who vanish from the screen about 5 minutes after they make their entrance, never to be heard from again....)
The movie basically comes down to a scattershot mess of a plot. You can’t care about the characters since none of them is a decent person to begin with, and the plot meanders from point to point without building any real tension. Give this one a pass. Stay home and rent Training Day and New Jack City instead.
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