The Town review

The Town (15, 124 mins)
Director: Ben Affleck
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The Town begins with a title card telling us that the Boston neighbourhood of Charlestown has over the years produced more bank robbers than anywhere else in the world. One such villain is Ben Affleck’s Doug MacRay, who along with potentially psychotic partner in crime Jimmy (Jeremy Renner) holds up a city bank managed by Rebecca Hall’s Claire. When Doug is forced to make contact with an unsuspecting Claire to find out what she’s told the police, it’s the catalyst for a muscular crime drama that marries a classical cops and robbers thriller to a believable romance and a search for redemption. A lean Affleck impresses in his first starring role in years, as does an edgy Renner, and Mad Men’s Jon Hamm is superb as the unswerving fed trying to build a case against them. It’s the relationship between Doug and Jimmy that gives The Town much of its dramatic and thematic heft, neatly sketching a tight-lipped community of blood brothers and codes of honour. As director Affleck expertly orchestrates thunderous shootouts and dizzying chases, and as co-writer peppers what could be well-worn scenes with crisp and evocative dialogue, even if the movie as a whole never quite achieves the moral complexity of his magnificent Gone Baby Gone.

The Other Guys review

The Other Guys (12A, 107 mins)
Director: Adam McKay
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson are the toughest, craziest, best cops in town. Unfortunately they get killed on duty and so the ‘other guys’ must step in – Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, who initially hate each other but must find a way to work together if they're to solve the big case involving Steve Coogan and some financial irregularities. The best compliment that can be paid to The Other Guys is that it’s hilarious without being a spoof, with Ferrell and Wahlberg playing it dead straight and the movie also working as a pin-sharp takedown of every overly macho cop thriller since Lethal Weapon. Both actors are exceptional, managing to throw in some moments of semi-improvised insanity alongside great character work and there’s sterling support from Michael Keaton as their long suffering captain and Eva Mendes as Ferrell’s “plain” wife. It’s easily Ferrell’s best film since Anchorman and it might just be the year’s best comedy.

Brooklyn’s Finest review

Brooklyn’s Finest (18, 132 mins)
Director: Antoine Fuqua
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Offering the value of three police thrillers for the price of one, Brooklyn’s Finest is a bruising, but far from perfect drama from the director of Training Day. And given the way it follows three very different New York cops through their day jobs and personal lives, it certainly seems as though Antoine Fuqua has spent a lot of time watching The Wire in the years since he guided Denzel Washington to an Oscar.

It’s a multi-character drama that refreshingly doesn’t try to bring all the stories together in convenient Crash style, although a masterful three-way crescendo around the half way point comes closest.

Ethan Hawke’s narcotics’ officer wants to better the lives of his family, but with four kids and two more on the way he finds he can’t do it on an honest cop’s salary. Richard Gere is the cliché of the hard drinking, one week from retirement veteran who has given up on the world. Don Cheadle is deep undercover and wants out, although his association with Wesley Snipes’ gangster is going to put a strain on that.

With such familiarity of setup and content the execution becomes all important, and Brooklyn’s Finest is equal parts compelling and flawed. Each storyline offers something of interest but it’s sometimes so clichéd that most character actions or developments can be seen coming from a mile away.

Which makes it all the more frustrating because somewhere in there is a top drawer police thriller that could have been teased out with a little more discipline and tightness and at least 20 minutes off the running time. A lot of stuff is piled on then forgotten about, such as Gere mentoring a rookie, and a young black man murdered by a cop that looks like it’s going to become the film’s focus but disappears entirely.

As is par for the course in films where tortured men posture and shout at each other, it’s steeped in machismo. Even Ellen Barkin gets in on the tough guy act, turning up in a sizzling cameo to bellow profanities as a high ranking officer who wants Cheadle to put away Snipes.

For the longest time, Cheadle’s seems like the most vital thread before it falls away into confused motivations, leaving Gere’s as the most redemptive, even though for a while it looked like being the most pointless.

Fine actors elevate it; a wired Hawke, weary Gere and Cheadle offering more power and rage than he’s often allowed to show. It’s handsome and gritty, intense and grave, with admirable, far reaching intentions and layered characters.

And yet it never wholly offers the sort of moral examinations necessary to make it truly complex or memorable, while an overblown and unsatisfying finale suggests Fuqua was beginning to run out of ideas.

The Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans review

The Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans (18, 122 mins)
Director: Werner Herzog

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Bad Lieutenant was a controversial 1992 police drama that starred Harvey Keitel as a thoroughly corrupt and irredeemable cop. Set in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, this in-name-only follow up is neither sequel nor remake but a crazed beast all of its own that brings in Nicolas Cage as the not so nice officer on the trail of some drug dealers.

For all that he’s addicted to painkillers and $5000 in the hole to his bookie, he still has an instinct for good police work, even if he’s more interested in stealing drugs from suspects and intimidating old ladies than making arrests. Director Werner Herzog is too busy having an enormous giggle to worry overly about an actual plot, which goes out the window fairly early.

Don’t for a minute expect a standard police procedural, not from this star and this director, who wisely realise the only way something this ripe can be justified is if it’s a rip-roaring black comedy. And it certainly is that; lurid, over the top and hilarious as Cage rampages through the city, abusing the guilty and the innocent alike, having more fun than he’s had in years, doing insane brilliantly without going bug-eyed.

What’s most remarkable is that it has the salt not to descend into a morality tale like many similar movies would. Just when you think it can’t get any nuttier, Herzog throws in a point of view shot from an imaginary iguana. And really, the only way it could have been any more demented is if he had reanimated the corpse of Klaus Kinski to play the lead.

Cop Out review

Cop Out (15, 107 mins)
Director: Kevin Smith
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Straight out cop-buddy flicks seem to have gone out of fashion, so it’s a surprise to see a real 80s throwback like Cop Out. Then again it’s so clichéd it might actually be a parody, as Bruce Willis and 30 Rock’s Tracy Morgan play a pair of cops taking on a big drugs case who don’t do things by the book, beat suspects, argue with their captain and end up suspended. This is the first time Kevin Smith has directed a film he hasn’t also written and it’s, so he can only be blamed for the generic action if not the feeble dialogue. Smith doesn’t even appear to be trying half the time, allowing a screeching tone from the off, generated mostly by the idiotic Morgan behaving like a child. Willis and Morgan are a hard pair to dislike, but it’s all just so laboured, with subplots about Willis’ daughter’s wedding and Morgan thinking his wife is having an affair proving to be desperate distractions. Constant references to other, better action movies don’t help matters and there’s only the rarest of inspired moments to relieve the tedium.