Darkly lit and surrounded in smoke and sinful situations, “We Own
the Night,” a Scorcese-esque look at crime and the cops that attempt to
control it, is saved by its own simplicity.
Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix play brothers who, in the
conventional crime saga way, are on the opposite sides of the law.
In another conventional coincidence, their father, played by veteran
Robert Duvall, is the police chief.
Obviously, the ideas here aren’t excitingly original; they’ve been
recycled a hundred times over and can seem uninspired. The execution,
though, is anything but, and the story covers surprising territory, which
thankfully, the countless previews haven’t even mentioned.
Don’t get me wrong; “Night” is awash in clichés, but they have more
to do with the set-up than with the story line.
The acting is top-notch. Phoenix, Wahlberg and Duvall convincingly
portray a family not entirely at peace with itself, and they do something
else that is equally important: They make us care.
Once the movie gets going, there is hardly a moment when the
audience doesn’t wonder, heart in throat, what will happen next. Eva
Mendes plays Phoenix’s girlfriend, in a role that successfully overcomes
the handicap usually associated with the doomed relationship plot line.
Where the film truly excels is in its set pieces. Unlike the mainstream
cops-and-robbers fare like “Bad Boys” and “The Departed,” director
James Gray chooses to add a certain level of restraint to his action
scenes. It serves him well, not only in the way that it sets itself apart
from the summer-season competition, but in the way that it appears to
be both cinematic and realistic at the same time.
A bullet-riddled drug raid is appropriately chaotic without being
flashy; the film’s highlight car-chase sequence is intense without being
idiotic. That chase scene, complete with a gray sky and drenching rain,
is the best in recent memory. It relies not on showy choreography but
on our investment in the characters. There’s no need to add a flash-bang
scene of action because, in Gray’s eyes, it won’t advance the story.
In this movie, cars don’t explode; they merely crash and crumble into
bits of metal. The characters don’t fall in graceful slow motion just to get
up without a scratch; they come plummeting down to earth and spend
weeks in the hospital as a result. This grit and authenticity take the
movie farther than you’d think, though it doesn’t entirely save it from
the recycled premise. It comes close, though. Real close.
Grade: B