Movie Math: Brooklyn's Finest

This "Movie Math" is an idea from Josh (L), which I'm going to take for this post as I recently watched a movie perfect for such an idea. Basically, on the theory that nothing new can come completely out of the air, the goal here is to try and draw up all the elements of past media and movies and figure out how they multiplied, added, subtracted, or divided to create whatever film you are viewing.

The movie at hand is Brooklyn's Finest, a modern day cop-and-gangster drama taking place in "BK" as the police chief spouts it in a sort of pre-flight pep talk before sending his cops out into various precincts. This movie, unsurprisingly, is from the director of Training Day (also starring the panicky Ethan Hawke) so it is very likely that Denzel's controvesial Oscar-winning movie will factor into this movie. Oh, also, it should go without saying that this post will contain spoilers for this movie, should any of you readers give a hoot.

That said, as we go from character to character, Don Cheadle also stars in this as a cop who went undercover, got real close to some people, namely Wesley Snipes, who saved Cheadle's life and is now back out of jail at the beginning of the movie. But Cheadle has been dying slowly on the inside, "forgetting which side he's on" or something like that. He just wants to say "Fuck it" to all cops and gangmembers alike. He pleads to what appeared to be the white coach from Remember the Titans for, of all things, a desk job. That's how bad it is in Brooklyn. Cheadle's role in this is maybe to show the undercover look into the druglord, gangmember side of this crime derrrama (which seems to be a sloppy and nowhere-as-good parody of scenes from The Wire with an unprecedented two cast members from the show itself, including a bearded Omar and one of Stinger's right-hand men), but we all know his real role is to lend comparisons to Crash, as yes, for all you adorers of Crash out there, this plot involves characters that don't necessarily know each other well or interact much until key moments when there brushes with each other in a twisted fate twister of drama-drenched events that define whatever the director's vision is: in this case, it's that being on either side of Brooklyn crime sucks.

Wesley Snipes is great in all things, and I like his character in this, a newly free man relearning the annoyances of dealing with snitches, putting the hammer down, and dealing with not be as awesome as Blade. I can't really say his presence lends any sort of baggage of movies to legitimately add to the movie math mix, but it was pretty funny to see him in cornrows that are braided in the back into an afro-rat-tail of sorts.

Richard Gere is basically the movie's anti-hero, playing the cop-about-to-retire role hard, getting into about ten different situations where the fact that he's about to retire comes up over and over. "But sir, let me remind if you want to reprimand him, he's literally going to retire in a couple days" or (Rookie cop says of Gere's day of retirement) "Hey, that day is my birthday, which means you've been in the force as long as I've been alive" (apparently 22 years). I'm blanking hard on the great cop-about-to-retire movies out there, so maybe I could get some help on that one. Google quickly shows me that Se7en is a fine example of an old, retiring cop & rookie cop movie, and I agree! Gere's role in this also shadows a couple other films a little absurdly, in that he asks a prostitute who he's grown really fond of to run away with him now that he's retired, tugging hard at maybe a real life take on Pretty Woman, because the hooker turns him down and tells him to get the fuck out of her place. The other movie, which is a mammoth to take a plot device from, (but it has a solid device to make your possibly-good-guy a much better guy) is that of Taxi Driver, as we watch Gere get slowly taken by multiple young women kidnapped and forced into sex slavery, where by the end of the movie when he continues to flirt with killing himself, he finds himself suddenly stalking the rapists and charging in the whorehouse or apartment as it were, to spring the young, drugged, topless, handcuffed, and beaten ladies free, while battling off the two rapists, an oaf and a sleepy, seemingly invincible street tough.

So what does that come out to so far?

2 parts of Training Day (the director and Hawke as a cop again) + 0.1*(the raspy voiced white coach in Remember the Titans) + an improper fraction (meaning greater than the whole of this movie) of characters from The Wire playing side roles of gangsters*2 - Matt Dillon and the rest of the crew from Crash except Cheadle and the tangled fate aspect*0.01 of the tangled fate in Magnolia (I had to throw it in, if only for the characters brushing past each other "incidentally") + Wesley Snipes in a relatively mild-mannered role for Wesley Snipes + 2 cops (Gere and a rookie (multiple rookies at that))*Se7en*(director's cruel sense of humor and insistence on portraying things gritty and harsh/Pretty Woman) + Taxi Driver attempt at redemption in saving whores - Harvey Keitel and all that goes with him - real emotions + stereotypical "dark", "hard knock" drama + 1*The Departed -esque surprise shooting sequence + hokey play-on-words-title = Brooklyn's Finest

Make sure you PEMDAS that shit, when you check it.