Depth of Love

Ocean Heaven [***1/2]

Following the rather stunning one-two punch of Jackie Chan's performances in The Shinjuku Incident and The Karate Kid that proved there was more to Chan than just being an adept physical performer, Jet Li follows up his turn in The Expendables with Ocean Heaven, as the cancer stricken single father of an autistic son. Like Chan and Shinjuku, Ocean eschews his typical gifts, but allows Li to deliver a strong and nuanced character that packs a punch in its own right.

If this premise sounds like it is designed specifically to tug at your heart strings and make you cry then chances are it probably will. If you take a gander at the poster above you can see Jet Li's face, he looks like a man with a depth of patience and understanding and you can practically see his halo as he smiles through the pain of his cancer. Li doesn't disappoint, he really embodies that saintly fellow of eternal patience. I suppose it's worth noting that he looks like a dude whose ass you could kick but don't want to because his smile is so adorable.

The movie is not about cheap sentiment despite a premise with an inherent minimum handkerchief limit. It takes the time to address some real concerns that Wang has. His son, Dafu, is twenty-one and severely autistic. I'll admit that because of TV's Parenthood and the movie Adam I was expecting a high functioning Asperger's Syndrome afflictee because I, somehow, forgot for a moment that other kinds of autism existed. If only The Shield were still around to remind me of such things (because, apparently, I learn nothing from actual life experience). Without his father's guidance Dafu has no way of taking care of himself so Wang spends his free time at work calling orphanages, mental care facilities, nursing homes and schools for the disabled wondering what exactly can be done. Dafu has the burden of being both too old and too young for the state to take care of him. Dafu's apparent unteachableness is magnified in numerous situations and you begin to feel, like Wang, exhausted.

Who knew that knowing you were dying had so much politics involved?

I imagine it's tough knowing you're going to die soon without really having a clear sense, in spite of preparation, of any sort of emotional or financial straits you may leave your family in. It's probably worse for anyone to whom the concept of death may be ungraspable and I think that Jet Li and the screenwriter have given these questions due consideration and created a very honest movie about death. It's so honest I don't know whether to cry or get my affairs in order. I honestly feel like I don't have time for the former.

Honestly, as good as Jet Li is and he's good enough to be considered for a Hong Kong film award, he is eclipsed by Zhang Wen who plays Dafu. Dafu appears to never be paying attention to his father, content to let everything be done for him while he pays attention to his few obsessions: swimming, dolphins, juggling, hide and seek and a girl. In a role with very little dialogue, Wen is able to convey his feelings with a series of finger twitches and a particular way of walking. Those gestures mean he is content or evened out while any shifts into anger can still be portrayed with screaming or crying jags. Wen never displays any sense of an actor playing a part, he lives and breathes the character and gives the character a sense of understanding we might not have thought possible. I don't mean to sound like those with certain severe forms of autism are incapable of higher thought, but until the film's final twenty minutes I didn't know if he'd ever understand the gravity of his situation. He seems to have gotten it, though. And not only gotten it but understood the magnitude all along. I like to think that Dafu's initial refusal to listen was an attempt to hold on to his father because if he doesn't understand then who will take care of him? You can't take him away, right? It wouldn't be fair.

The best thing about Ocean Heaven is that it never stops exploring or probing its deeper questions. The movie could've milked you for tears or taken you on a bullshit series of misadventures, but the movie isn't eager to throw caution to the wind. It addresses questions of legacy when it isn't dealing with the red tape of dying on a time table. The rare moments in the film when Dafu and Wang find themselves separated allows us to see the unconscious influence they've exerted over each other all these years. Wang stands in his son's favorite hiding place one night as if he expects, like Dafu does, that the other will materialize out of thin air. My favorite, of course, is the triumph represented by the moment when Dafu finally moves his stuffed dog from atop the television without having to be told.

Ocean Heaven is a simple story told with remarkable care and precision. It's not just about what it means to be a parent or a son, but about what we carry with us when one leg of the journey is over and the next one begins.

Mass. affection

The Town [****]

There are two Ben Afflecks on display in The Town, one is the poised visual stylist who in the space of two films manages to stand shoulder to shoulder with some of cinema's heavyweights. The other is the actor whose own rise and potential fall is echoed in that of his character, former hockey player and bank robbery mastermind Doug MacRay. MacRay like Affleck was raised in a single parent home, like Affleck enjoyed notoriety (Affleck as a screenwriter and actor, once upon a time, MacRay as a hockey player who blew two chances and now leads the fated life of a Townie-- a born and bred criminal) and through the love of a good woman and divine providence comes to a point where redemption seems the next obvious step. Affleck is enjoying his second life as an actor and receiving well deserved praise for his proficiency with a camera. He has also settled into the role of family man with a wife and two daughters, but both Affleck and his fictional counterpart play their roles with a tentativeness. As men who have had it all before and know what it's like to lose it all.

In many ways the ease with which Affleck has settled into being a director, a legitimately great one at that, has a way of calling attention to itself. If we can evoke comparisons to Michael Mann (The Town is Heat in Boston, after all) from a narrative standpoint and in the crisp, concise way he shoots action, for those reasons we can also draw upon Sam Peckinpah too. Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood for how quickly he established himself as a force to be reckoned with then we must acknowledge a debt to everything that has come before. Affleck the director can shoulder that burden, but Affleck the actor turns the film into a naked, emotional plea from an artist.

Most of The Town is spent with Affleck's character getting to know the woman he and his crew kidnapped during a bank robbery. She didn't see their faces, but knows one small detail that can send them all down the river. So post kidnapping he befriends her to assess the risk (which is fairly big as evidenced by the above sentence) and begins to fall in love with her. During one of their dates he cracks a joke about how all of his TV watching gives him insight into the mechanics of crime fighting. It's not the joke that matters so much that it's the first time Affleck has cracked a joke on film in seven years. His old charm and charisma begin to shine through, but it's self conscious, a tentative baby step towards the easygoing, confident Affleck of yore. The man is probably more loved now than he's ever been but now that you see his face it's probably easier to hold him accountable for the sins of the past so you don't let the smile linger too long, you remember that it's all a house of cards.

You might be wondering, how does his tentativeness translate into a plea? Well it's the first time he's joked on film in seven years and it's on a date. Saying the wrong thing could send everything crashing down, but he can't unsay it. It's out there to be accepted or rejected. The film's final image also offers up Doug MacRay as a character on the cusp of redemption. Affleck the director has a way with actors (including himself) and in the coda of his film he makes peace with who he was, but knows that what his audience thinks of him matters so he leaves it to his audience to unify the two halves.

But the part of Affleck that is liked and respected continues to flourish. Ben Affleck elicits flawless performances from everyone in his ensemble. Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner, Affleck and Rebecca Hall are all expectedly terrific. I also like the return of working class grit embodied by Slaine Jenkins as getaway driver Albert Maglone and Titus Welliver as a Charlestown bred FBI agent. His action scenes as previously stated are terrific. Crisp, concise, intelligible. Jeremy Renner's last stand with the police is evocative of Steve McQueen's shootout with the police in Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway. He's not anywhere near as stoic as McQueen or calculating but he goes for broke in a fairly hopeless situation and it's a thrilling sight.

When you get right down to it, The Town, more than being an exceptional acting showcase or action picture stripped down to it's bare essentials is a love letter. Ben Affleck has a way of framing his fair city in a way that gives it character, but also as the place that defines him as a performer and an individual.

If every city is drowning and all of it's inhabitants are just waiting to be saved Affleck is the benevolent God who will do so. Consider scenes from both of his directorial efforts: in "Gone Baby Gone" hero Patrick Kenzie has reunited a young girl with her drug addled mother and an uncertain future. By the letter of the law he has done the right thing and by the burden of Catholic guilt he has done the thing that lets him sleep at night. In his heart of hearts is it the right thing? Probably not, but it's an acceptable risk. Another hero is willing to make the same trade off with a similarly lifestyled mother in The Town and it speaks to Affleck's unconditional acceptance of the denizens of Boston and their myriad flaws.

One of the most haunting images in The Town is an establishing shot of the prison that houses Doug MacRay's father. It's desolate, lonely and cold reminding us that we live in a city of ghosts, but that ghosts are the sum of our experience. That being said the coda of The Town offers us the chance to reconcile with the ghosts of our past and anyone who hasn't taken the opportunity to forgive Affleck the sins of 2003 would do well to offer him the grace he affords his characters.

Something Something Button Mash

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World [*]

I have to admit upfront that the previews for Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World does pretty close to nothing for me. Michael Cera despite his infinite sameness can be charming, Edgar Wright because of his ability to understand our base, simple desires and affections and validate them with excellent motion pictures and a few actors gamely hamming it up could've/should've been the wild cards that make this film better than it looks. It doesn't work. Edgar Wright brings nothing short of his usual visual coherence and crisp editing to the film, but aside from one genuinely satisfying, pulse quickening sequence Wright is powerless despite what he brings to the table.

This might be the first Edgar Wright film to feel paced exactly like an evening with Michael Cera. It doesn't really move so much as mope, the narrative never gains any moment even as the stakes grow and the climax approaches. The film remains so evenly keeled and unenthusiastic. Speaking of which, a bored looking Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays pink haired Ramona Flowers. Scott's unrequited crush/ love interest/ Amazon delivery girl that literally travels through Scott's empty headspace that motivates him. Sure he'll fight for Ramona, but he'll also string along an immensely sweet and more likable seventeen year old girl with whom he is in a sexless non-relationship. But Scott only fights to be with Ramona (read: in Ramona), his struggles don't actually include any self improvement, at least, not in the way the film leads you to believe there will be.

So then comes a series of less than exciting battles against exes that employs the usual video game tropes of sixty-four hit combos, extra lives and people exploding into coins. Although to be fair, the one truly inspired set-piece involves Scott being "controlled" (gotta love the wordplay) by Ramona when he expresses his reluctance to fight her ex-girlfriend because, well, he doesn't hit girls. It's the only moment in which Scott displays a genuine awareness and concern for anyone not himself. I'm also a sucker for the other person as weapon and an inversion of the chivalrous idea of a man not hitting a woman and child (at the insistence of another woman of course).

The arched eyebrows and over enunciation of Chris Evans as action star Lucas Lee culminate in the movie's biggest missed opportunity and anti-climax (he rail grinds to his own doom) while Brandon Routh's super powered Vegan sub-plot offers up a delightful pair of cameos, but all inspiration remains but a blip on the map of Scott Pilgrim's world.

I've begun to consider the possibility, as I write this review, that the Scott Pilgrim source material is not meant to be affectionate in any way, I don't know how or why you pick video game loving, garage band hipster geeks as your target of derision(comic book lovers and film lovers, too, if we're considering all mediums the story is presented in). According to the IMDb page it is sometimes referred to as Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life which I have to take as derogatory. It says to me poor Scott Pilgrim, sharing a house and bed with his gay roomie, has a seventeen-year-old girl fawning all over him, is in a band called "Sex Bob-Omb" (also deeply sarcastic) and no means of visible income or support, man life is rough for this poor sap. I think the reason Scott's sister is always yelling at him is because he's a bum that life always seems to work out for and he's only motivated to fight for someone's vagina meanwhile she's ALWAYS working. I also think after the excellence of Up In The Air, Anna Kendrick is not so secretly frustrated with going back to being that one girl with a small part in a bad movie played by a one note actor.

I also can't help but wonder if Edgar Wright's participation is some sort of a warning that he's done with the clever/affectionate geek out shit. I know he has respect for genre films, video games (as evidenced by his UK series Spaced) and comic books and that he approached the film with the utmost professionalism, but it has also been eleven years since Spaced and from what I can tell everybody in all of Wright's other work may have had arrested development and simple pleasures but they were adults with jobs who tried so they deserved a little bit of a fantastical respite when life got too much for them to bear. Scott Pilgrim is five years out of high school, unemployed and sees life through the prism of a video game which puts him well within the realm of needing to grow the hell up.

As someone who is probably in the minority in disliking this film I'd like to point out something to its champions: the film's Universal logo is down in the 8-bit graphic style smacking anybody with an affection for video games square in the nostalgia bone. But I believe it betrays the integrity of that love by having Scott initially lose to the final boss and before activiating his extra life for a do-over all of Scott's mistakes are explicitly spelled out and he is told what lessons he needs to learn. Part of the sense of accomplishment, appeal and fun of those games was the earned ending. We made our own mistakes, figured them out for ourselves and corrected them. What happens to Scott Pilgrim is tantamount to having a cheat code for life and, maybe even, the simplest and most undemanding existence of all.

What I'm saying in the most explicit way possible is that you have all been mocked. Anybody who has dared to take an interest in the story no matter the medium has been mocked. If you don't believe you're being made fun of then understand that you are at least encouraging the most dishonest movie of the year to spread more poison.

The Cutting Kind

Machete [***1/2]

Robert Rodriguez's Machete comes dangerously close to being the first wholly successful competitor in the recent throwback sweepstakes that has beset cinema since mid-August. First, Stallone took the can't lose premise and casting of The Expendables and made a mediocre disjointed mess. Next, Alexandre Aja's Piranha 3-D saddled us with its most boring characters for the biggest chunk of its running time then almost made up for it with a full-on blood bath and great Christopher Lloyd appearances. Sure there were boobs (and good ones), but that doesn't make up for the wealth of Jerry O'Connell the movie gives us. Then along comes Robert Rodriguez's finally feature-length Machete. The first theatrical trailer didn't quite have the trash appeal of the original, but I was hoping for the best and largely it delivers.

The plot such as it is concerns Danny Trejo as the titular ex-Federale betrayed by his boss and displaced to America after a drug lord murders his wife. He becomes the patsy of a conservative senator's advisor (Jeff Fahey) in an attempt to assassinate said senator so that his chances at election rise exponentially and his border closing initiative can begin. The initiative stands to greatly benefit the aforementioned drug lord (Steven Seagal) and this betrayal greatly benefits Machete because it puts everybody who needs Machete's blade up their ass right in his path.

Machete ends up becoming allied with an ICE agent (Jessica Alba) and a mysterious woman named She (like Che (Michelle Rodriguez)) to help him fight his war. Machete is a big bad ass who really doesn't need help with the physical stuff but the scope of betrayal necessitates that he make friends whether he likes it or not. She runs a group called the Network that helps illegals find jobs, feeds them when they have no work and helps them escape from hitmen in a crowded hospital.

Danny Trejo has been around since the days of Desperado and with his first starring role it's nice to see that Trejo really has talent and charisma rather than just a look that Rodriguez finds gives his films character. He's a really authentic part of the Rodriguez verse, he's got pretty good deadpan comic timing and when he says the classic "you just fucked with the wrong Mexican" line you believe it. The guy's wife was killed right in front of him, bosses, beautiful ladies and politicians betray him and now he's used somebody's guts as a rope. I'd say the entire ordeal is starting to wear on him. He's also pretty good with machetes, blows people's brains out with relative ease too. He's pretty much who I want Antonio Banderas to grow up to be. Most of the other questionable casting actually works out pretty well. Big gambles were made on Jessica Alba and Lindsay Lohan and they actually pay off. Lohan's character is saddled with a lot of the same real life baggage she has (i.e. someone in serious need of rehab with a possibly perverted father and skanky mother) and while I won't say it makes her performance raw or honest I think it made it easier for her to come to work prepared. Jessica Alba might be too pretty to be plausible but ever since she got her face pummeled in by Casey Affleck I'm more willing to give her and her work a chance. I think one of these days somebody is honestly going to figure out what purpose she best serves in a movie and give her the right role.

Sadly, though, Machete still performs a major misstep. As the film goes on and gains momentum it isn't simply about revenge it becomes a film about the immigration issue. As Machete pursues his quest for revenge the myth of himself grows and he starts to represent the downtrodden masses caught between the worlds of their nightmares and their dreams. Machete's allies take up arms alongside him and this leads to an all-out actual war. Machete's personal revenge is given short shrift and the movie's politics take center stage. I don't have any grievances with what the film has to say on the issue of immigration. When Lindsay Lohan's character comes gunning for DeNiro's uber-conservative senator and then, upon achieving her goal, literally shoots the guns from the hand of every man fighting to help along the movie's climax I appreciated what was being said: another war isn't going to solve this problem. On the other hand, in a damning way, I think it was also being suggested that without a personal stake in the fight we should just walk away. Perhaps leaving the border fence question as an eternally debatable one is better than turning it into an avoidable tragedy.

The issue seems too big for this particular movie, not that the movie doesn't have the right to address it, but the importance of this particular discussion is too much for the movie to bear. On the one hand I look like I don't care about the larger themes of the film, but I do. I also wanted the satisfaction of a revenge film and I don't quite get that. It's a double edged sword this film.

However, if we're going to get the two promised Machete sequels I'll take him in whatever strength we get him: avenger, superman, folk hero. But whatever evolution he undergoes I hope the ending of this film serves as a reminder that every transition can only bear so much weight on its shoulders.

To the limit

The American [***]

Control director Anton Corbijn's second picture as director, The American evokes memories of yet another picture about control, the aptly titled Limits of Control by Jim Jarmusch. Both are films that unfold at a speed roughly the pace of a Sunday drive (that probably sounds like a negative when phrased in such a way, but it is actually a pretty high compliment), both films feature a leading man whose expressionless face could bore holes through stone, they love espresso and often find themselves in the company of a beautiful naked woman (although only the hero of Jarmusch's film has the capacity to resist urges of any kind). What makes both films smashing successes is the way the hero is often left alone with his own thoughts. As a hitman how often do you contemplate, in your loneliness, your own death? Do you ever wonder if the only other guy who knows where you are is conspiring against you? That's how a movie in which nothing much happens is able to pull you in. It gives you time to think about the aforementioned questions, but also given the right actor you can see past the stone-pokerfacedness and watch those introspective gears turn. It's a way of knowing that we're asking ourselves the right question as an audience.

Admittedly, The American is a fairly typical George Clooney role. An equal in tone and pacing to Michael Clayton in which his character, a consummate and unflappable bad ass in his chosen profession, who comes to the late in the game realization that he's been working for the wrong side all along. And if he has always known that fact, and let's assume that he is smart enough to be aware of this, the movie is usually about the final job in a line of work that threatens to destroy his soul entirely.

Clooney has always had an understated world weariness to him and he uses it to great effect here as he typically does. I like best the smaller moments that let us see the constantly engaged hitman's brain in action. When visiting a local mechanic he quickly scans the shed for the parts he'll need to build a sound suppressor for a rifle. It's a deftly edited sequence that shows a man quick on his feet, a contrast to the slightly frazzled trigger man we see in the film's opening. Editing aside, Clooney brings a keen sense of awareness to the proceedings. He's constantly calling his boss and delaying the job because he's starting to grapple, perhaps for the first time ever, with an inability to detach himself from his work. If his work is to be in Italy he will, of course, fall in love with someone. He also becomes friends with a priest, both are ways of passively and aggressively searching for an avenue out of his life of crime.

The American is not a typically breathlessly paced Hollywood thriller but a slow burner that examines the consequences of a certain kind of life with a certain amount of speed and care. It is also another worthy addition to the typical George Clooney character pantheon.

The Patriot Act(ion)

Yuen Woo-Ping's True Legend is a certifiably grand entertainment that traffics in ridiculously over-the-top fights, unrequited love and hate, vengeance and patriotism. In short, it's everything I've come to expect from every martial arts movie I've seen since Donnie Yen's phenomenal starring vehicleIp Man. Vincent Zhao essays the lead role of Su, a fearless warrior who wants to settle into family life and teach wushu, so he refuses a promotion. This means good things for two colleagues, Ma and Yuan, but Yuan resents Su for always being given the things he turns down. Yuan's jealousy comes to a head when he loses the woman he loves to Su. He murders their adoptive father and, using the five venom fist, vanquishes Su into what should be a lonely, watery grave.

However, the woman he did this for forsakes her child and plunges in after Su. This really angers Yuan who has to put up with Su's little brat in the hopes that the kid's mother will one day come to reclaim him. Maybe in the meantime he can come up with a better plan to woo Mommy or, assuming they didn't have such things at the time, invent a foundation that will make him look not so deathly gray.

At this point, I should comment on a couple of the film's really nifty touches: the villain has a super lightweight armor fused to his skin and his deathly gray pallor comes from the poisons injected in him by various scorpions and spiders. He sticks his hands into a box full of them, much like Tong Po did with glass in Kickboxer or Charlie Sheen did with caramel and gummy bears in Hot Shots Part Deux! The second things is that when Su begins rehabilitating his hair is grown long and he's punching a tree to build up his strength. The heart warms at this unexpected homage to Hard to Kill and why shouldn't it? Because if there's one thing Su proves by the end of his crazy journey it's that he's hard to kill.

Another point of Su's rehab is his training with the Old Sage (Gordon Liu) and the God of Wushu (Jay Chou). The sage cackles maniacally and strokes his long white beard while the God of Wushu handily deflects Su's every strike and knocks him from countless precipices. The "training sequence" and a showdown with another drunken boxer compromise the two worst sequences of the film. The training is full of horrendous computer generated images of mountains that make the film look like a sub Monkey King adventure film. The sequence with the other drunken boxer isn't too bad, but it's marred by what looks like breakdancing moves and a desire to speed the competitors up via CG so that it looks like they're trying to drill holes into the floor. They're pretty ugly mistakes in a film that doesn't make many at all.

Besides the above mentioned sequences the fights in the film are pretty exceptional. The first being Su's showdown with Venom Fist Master, Yuan, which is the kind of righteously angry battle you should expect from a guy whose come to claim his wife and son from his most mortal enemy. There's a particularly impressive sequence in a snake pit where both men make exceptional use of the confined space, doing the splits to hold themselves in place while just wailing on each other or shimmying past each other to avoid attacking snakes. A real person couldn't get that much mileage out of confined spaces, but it seems like a surprisingly normal and plausible person in a confined space type of fight for a wuxia movie.

The film has a third act that's entirely different from what I expected. Su's showdown with Yuan happens with about forty minutes left in the film and when it's over there's a whole other direction for the film's last half hour. It moves in a cycle of Fall, Revenge, Redemption and Redemption is inarguably the most crowd pleasing-est part.

Haunted by the failure to save his wife Su is a raging drunk and a beggar. In one scene his son barters to buy a sweet potato and when he goes to split it with his father (they don't show what I'm about to tell you in its entirety) it seems like the guy eats the whole potato when his kid's back is turned. But he receives charity from Ma, one of his fortunate buddies from the beginning, who is the head of the Wushu federation. Su decides to pay Ma back by defending the country's honor in a free for all against fighters of other disciplines. But Ma failed to defend his country's honor first, so it's more like he's getting a redemptive revenge to make up for not saving his wife, which is slightly less honorable, but not much because the stakes are higher than they were previously. Su fights a trio of wrestlers played by mammoth seven footers. The mammoth seven footers angle is typical of films like Jet Li's Fearless in that they are non-Asian, but that isn't always the case. However, the specimen in films meant to please the crowd is always ostensibly physically superior. With the exception of Ip Man it's hard to know for sure if the hero will survive if their opponent is non-Asian. I guess you can gauge whether it is truly the country's honor at stake or personal honor to determine the hero surviving, but this is usually a metaphor for national Chinese honor all the same.*

The finale is brutal, with wrestling moves like tombstones and power bombs contributing to the requisite head trauma induced by a small guy being attached to wires and doing impossible things to impossibly big guys who beat him impossibly bad before realizing his spirit and body cannot be broken. It's a tense fight because people fighting for their country's honor in exhibition matches tend to receive Apollo Creed inRocky IV levels of brokenness. And the film's final fight gloriously milks that tension and patriotism. The tension is also sold by the bond Su shares with his on-screen son who shows a genuine concern for his father and can cry like nobody's business. The scene where he declares that he won't leave his father despite it being his best option is genuinely touching. He was pretty much abandoned by one parent once before and his other parent is a mess because of what happened to the other parent. This kid knows his parents love each other and him, but he openly and directly suffers as a result of it twice. But he is wonderful and selfless about it. It gives the excitement of the fights an extra layer of emotional resonance.

Despite an unfortunate act two setback, True Legend is thrilling and appropriately warmhearted with only a couple of regrettable details to be found. On that note, I'll leave you with a final detail to ponder. On the set of Kill Bill it was rumored that David Carradine and Woo-Ping were not big fans of one another. I don't know if that's true or if they share a stubborn old martial artists animosity that results in the occasional blow up that seems like a big deal to everyone but them, but Woo-Ping has dedicated this film to Carradine's memory and cast him as an unabashedly cartoonish asshole of a villain who dopes up his wrestlers to ensure the destruction of the "Chinaman." Is this a fun tribute to your a-hole buddy or a final middle finger? I don't know. But I like it.

Note: Objections to my use of the phrase Chinese honor are expected. Sometimes I also say things like "not rape, but date rape." It's not a distinction I make for any reason other than it was an accident and I said it in later conversations almost reflexively. It is, however, a hilarious language gaffe.

Three And Out

Brooklyn's Finest [***1/2]

Brooklyn's Finest tells three different stories involving a police officer at a cross roads: First, we have Sal (Ethan Hawke) a morally compromised cop who may or may not have been a bad guy before his wife's sickness and ever expanding family caused the sudden need to move to a bigger place. A need that can only be met with cold, hard (and ultimately dirty) cash. Next is Doogan (Richard Gere), a hair's breadth away from retirement who wakes every morning and puts an unloaded gun in his mouth and squeezes the trigger. Doogan is reluctantly assigned as a training officer his final week on the job and we see that his style of policing (for the most part) matches his one foot out the door approach to life. Finally, we have Tango (Don Cheadle) an undercover detective working as a drug kingpin in a particularly violent Brooklyn apartment complex. He's close to getting the desk job that he always wanted, but his last assignment requires betraying his only real friend in the life, Casanova Philips (Wesley Snipes), who saved his life during his job related stint in prison. The three stories never really connect on a deeper level, characters cameo in each other's stories in mostly superficial ways, but they all end up in the same crime ridden apartment complex on a fateful night and pretty much remain strangers.

Director Antoine Fuqua is no stranger to stories of police corruption, he and Hawke navigated similar terrain in 2001's Training Day, where Hawke's character only dabbled in ways of villainy. Here Hawke is a full-on bad guy with a badge, not necessarily a bad man in general, but in close proximity to drug money he is the worst morally compromised sort. He's got a pregnant, sick wife, the doctor keeps telling him to move out of his mold infested house and just when you think you've met his entire brood there comes another child. Six including the twins his wife is carrying. No wonder Sal is seen in a church not asking for forgiveness, but chastising God for his dire straits and asking for help. If your God won't let you have birth control maybe he owes it to you to help get a bigger house.

Ethan Hawke is always good at playing The Guy with a Choice, sometimes like in Daybreakers there's a clear right way to go and there's no moralizing to it while in other film's he's just a born criminal (Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, What Doesn't Kill You), but Brooklyn's Finest gives Hawke the fertile middle ground that allows him to justifiably seethe with righteous anger and kick himself for saving a friend instead of taking the money and running.

I've always liked the films of Antoine Fuqua they're swift and entertaining and occasionally they deliver larger than life characters, but until this film there hasn't actually been a legitimately great dramatic moment in any of his previous works. Gere's Doogan lives a burnout's life. Other younger cops harass him and call him a coward, his only friends are apparently fish and the prostitute he visits on a weekly basis. Doogan's proposition to the prostitute to run away with him (wherein he serenades her with "Sea of Love") is a sweet emotionally naked moment for Doogan and it really backfires on him. Or does it? He makes the proposal to her because she buys him a watch as a retirement present, she rejects him and it's sad. Maybe he even contemplates killing himself, but he bought his fishing gear already. He knows he's a born loner, but maybe he needs to see if he has a chance of retiring with someone at his side. So he tried it, and the thought of suicide that he entertains every morning, is faux suicide. Doogan's way of saying, it could be worse, now let's get going. It's like having back pain and taking twelve Aleve in the morning just to get up. You're old, you're broken but you're not dead.

Until this third viewing I never realized that Doogan could just be being overdramatic at being a man defeated by life. He's done with the job, sure, but his last week is also threatening to get pretty interesting and he doesn't want that either. He's so uninterested in accolades or work that he refuses to fabricate a story that could save a rookie's career and earn him a citation, but more importantly he's ready to go home.

It's nice to see, if also brutal and horrifying, that before he can walk into the sunset Doogan has to go renegade to save a missing girl. The sense of purpose infused within Doogan in the film's final moments is a lot like reading George Pelecanos' novel "The Night Gardener" without the bitter irony of what happened to the ex-cop in that book. In general, I think Brooklyn's Finest is capable of doling out humanity and irony and valiant violence in a way that is evocative of Pelecanos.

Don Cheadle and Ethan Hawke's stories come the closest to fully intersecting, but the character played by Cheadle is never mentioned by Hawke even though it is his lackeys that Hawke and other cops are constantly busting and/or murdering. Cheadle's character struggles with the idea of whether or not to descend fully into his street persona and he confides this much in his boss (Will Patton), but what keeps him from doing exactly that is his loyalty to Philips' moreso than the job. He doesn't have anything to prove to fellow gangster Red (Michael K. Williams) by not wanting to beat a snitch to death, but any indulgence of his undercover persona makes Philip's harder to help out and it's Tango's desire to have it both ways that fuels the story. I like the chemistry between Cheadle and Snipes, a roof top scene between the two is similarly evocative of the final scene between Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale. Men on top of an empire, the betrayal of one, by another, inevitable. You get a sense of their history in the way they interact with each other and talk about their hopes and dreams and even plan a final score. Had it gone that far, the scene of confession between Cheadle and Snipes probably would've been heartbreaking.

What the film does give us, introspection from another action stalwart of a bygone era, is pretty good stuff. This might be the last time a movie allows Wesley Snipes to be this good. I'd like to be wrong, though. Cheadle is really good, too, wielding the righteous anger and calling Ellen Barkin a dude. The situation is tense and the choice yet another unenviable one. Somehow this feels like the weakest section of the film, maybe because it traffics too much in familiarity from a pop culture standpoint with vets from TVs The Wire and Brotherhood but also countless other films. It's tough to say, after all, the Gere segment did elicit a Pelecanos' comparison. Maybe, and probably, it's as simple as "I can't betray him he's my friend" isn't as compelling as "I will buy my family's new house with your blood" and "all I'm trying to do is live my life unnoticed and I can't" are much more compelling dilemmas to be faced with.