Imagine a road trip through the Colorado mountains. After admiring the massive snow-capped Rockies and the lush green valleys, you turn away from the backseat window for a second to get your camera. As you turn back to snap a picture, you hesitate. Something seems wrong — the mountains look less impressive, the valleys not as green. Not only that, but the same mountain has gone by at least five times. Upon closer inspection, you realize that the once interesting and engaging view has been replaced with a repeating painted background — think Scooby-Doo cartoon scenery.
Watching “We Own The Night” is much like watching this scenery change — the movie starts out with depth and character intrigue before hitting a snag halfway through and diving right into a cop-movie cliché plot.
At first, the plot focuses on the tension between two brothers in ‘80s era New York. Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix) owns a club full of extensive drug use. Bobby goes by his mother’s maiden name for both his brother Joseph Grusinsky (Mark Wahlberg) and his father Burt (Robert Duvall) are cops, and being connected to police would be bad for business — nobody wants to go to a club owned by a narc, after all.
The tension comes in when a headstrong Joseph revs up the narcotics division of the department and takes a harder line on drug abuse. They use Bobby’s club as a starting point for the crackdown, and from there the drama on the streets and in the Grusinsky home reaches the boiling point.
Or at least it should have.
The conflict laid out here between the two brothers goes on the shelf. What began as a high-stakes war on the streets with one family split between sides becomes a string of cops-against-drug-dealers movie clichés. The typical foreign mob (Russian this time), the shady deals out in a field somewhere, the cops looking for revenge against the ringleader with the ominous foreign name, the last minute twist, the new drug-transport technique — and not to mention the cliché lines (“We’re gonna get [foreign-name guy],” “Don’t play games with me”) — the list goes on. (And so does the movie — the pacing slows to such a crawl that the few action sequences there are can’t save it.)
This turn towards cop-movie mediocrity is sad, especially because of all the talent on display. Phoenix shows the same method acting he pulled off as Johnny Cash in “Walk The Line.” Wahlberg does a great job humanizing a hard-nosed character without seeming too soft. Duvall is at his usual high standard playing the hardened old chief. Eva Mendes, who plays Bobby’s girlfriend Amada Juarez, brings warmth and energy to a role that would have been easy to play as the “cheap girlfriend” stereotype.
Director James Grey isn’t a slouch either. His crowd scenes and wide portrait shots, along with the choice to use period pop music for background, subtly set up the film’s atmosphere.
With all this, it’s a shame that the good movie quits halfway in and the bad one takes over. It’s like if “The Departed” changed reels and became an episode of “Miami Vice” without warnng. The journey may look nice, but be prepared for disappointment at the destination.
