Movie Review: We Own the Night

(andPOP) - We Own The Night begins with a series of photos that look like they were taken from real-life police procedurals. The title appears along the bottom of a badge worn by an NYPD officer. If you're going for grim n' gritty, there are worse ways to do it.

The setup is familiar: two brothers on opposite sides of the law. One of them (Mark Wahlberg) is a police officer, while the other (Joaquin Phoenix) owns a nightclub that's a haven for the Russian mafia. Naturally their father (Robert Duvall) is a police chief.

Is there any need to expand on the story? It doesn't go anywhere we haven't seen before, though it does have some good elements. Chief among these is the believable bond between Phoenix's character, Bobby Green, and his girlfriend, Amada Juarez, played by Eva Mendes. The film begins with a sex scene between them that proves you don't need to show a lot of skin to be explicit. There's also enough action to satisfy genre fans, and Phoenix and Wahlberg share a couple of believable enough fight scenes as the squabbling brothers.

The problem is none of the film's elements cross over from merely "good" to "great." As the leads, Phoenix and Wahlberg are good performers, but they're at their best when part of an ensemble. On their own they're not as capable as, say, Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, or Mel Gibson and Russell Crowe, of carrying a picture. They certainly give it a good shot; Wahlberg is believable as a straight-arrow, though the script doesn't give him much to work with, and Phoenix competently holds the centre of the story, though I never believed he was as corrupt as he looked in the opening scenes.

What we're left with is a good story, competently acted and competently told. There are worse things to see at the multiplex, but I certainly wouldn't recommend this over, say, The Bourne Ultimatum or 3:10 to Yuma.

4*