TMG Scale 6.0
Starring Richard Gere, Ethan Hawke, Wesley Snipes, Don Cheadle

Good cop, bad cop, worse cop, washed up cop, cop a plea and cop out. Brooklyn’s Finest? Hardly.  Brooklyn’s Dirtiest might have been a more appropriate title for this film.  About the only message I got from this film was not to ever visit Brooklyn. I mean ever! Having said that, this was an OK film to watch on a cramped airplane from Austin to Chicago.

This is a cop film, pure and simple. TMG is quite certain you have figured that out by now. I think the overall message was whether you are a bad cop or a good criminal, you get the same bad result in the end…or in the chest, or in the back of head as the case may be. It clearly was an unfair caricature of all good New York policemen and women.  It is a little less clear what the cop played by Richard Gere was all about. With seven days (a biblical reference?) to retirement, Gere faces his own demons and perhaps realization he never really made a difference at anything. His acting was superb as always, but he sure seemed as though he was lost on the wrong Hollywood set.  Same for Don Cheadle and Ethan Hawke. They all deserved a better and more original script.  Wesley Snipes ironically plays a thug named “Caz” about to go back to prison. It is amazing how life imitates fiction. But is this film he ends up ‘in the red’ by his buddies rather than the IRS.

TMG was not even sure this movie treated low life, drug dealers fairly. I am guessing there are a few well dressed drug runners in Brooklyn that don’t use unintelligible gangsta speak or use the “F” word as noun, pronoun, verb and adjective, all in the same sentence.  There may be a few black men in Brooklyn that do not refer to each other by the “N” word. Just my guess.  Hard to know I suppose. Though the thugs in this film were often more polite and spoke better English than the Untied Airlines employees TMG encountered on this flight.

TMG is not sure what made him feel dirtier, this movie or Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.  When did this great American city and airport get so filthy.

If you like lots of sweat, blood and shooting and hot Brooklyn nights, this film foots the bill.  It at least got me through my flight to Chicago.