READ MORE: We Own the Night at Cannes

GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 10/11/07)

The new picture from writer-director James Gray, who also made the affecting dramas Little Odessa and The Yards, is a prodigal-son variant set in 1988 New York wherein party boy Joaquin Phoenix plays the lost-then-found role. Phoenix is initially boyish and appealing as Bobby Green, a Brooklyn nightclub manager on a roll: he's got a hot new girlfriend (Eva Mendes), and his spot is raking in the dough for its owner, Bobby's mentor, a Russian entrepreneur who seems content to relax with his grandkids while Bobby takes care of business.

Bobby's inconvenient secret is that his last name's actually Grusinsky, and that his brother (Wahlberg, who costarred with Phoenix in The Yards) and his dad (Robert Duvall, on gruff autopilot) are both cops. Brother Joe just got put in charge of a narc unit that's targeting a Russian drug dealer who operates out of Bobby's club. Joe and dad want Bobby to help them out; Bobby chafes; and soon enough Joe is raiding the place and Bobby himself gets swept up in the arrests. This, understandably, heightens the already tense state of affairs between the brothers. There's a juicy confrontation wherein Joe makes a disparaging remark about Bobby's "little Puerto Rican girlfriend," and Bobby spits back, "Why don't you try thinking about my little Puerto Rican girlfriend while you're trying to fuck your fat fucking wife!" Ouch.

So far, so tough. But after Joe is gunned down in a failed hit (because these Russians, you know, they don't care about shooting cops), Bobby's transformation into an avenger is handled in a lumbering, obvious fashion. The plot reveals are also plenty easy to predict, which wouldn't be so bad if the character stuff was working. One particular nadir is reached when Phoenix blows away a bad guy while using his Johnny Cash Walk the Line sneer. (Let me pick a few more nits while I'm at it: the club-music soundtrack is about six years off the movie's stated period, and while I guess it was nice that Gray got former NYC mayor Ed Koch to play himself, the digital effects used to make him look 20 years younger gives his cameos the creepy feel of those Orville Redenbacher ads currently blighting American television.)

In spite of one remarkably tense, beautifully executed set piece — a car-chase-shootout in the pouring rain — We Own the Night can't sustain itself; as the stakes of the story get higher, Gray paints it in broader and broader strokes until there's almost nothing you can believe in it anymore. The carefully orchestrated alternations between reflectiveness and rage that made The Yards so compelling here give way to hackneyed and predictable melodrama and a ham-fisted tendency to tell rather than show, capped off by two final lines of dialogue that, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one would have to have a heart of stone to hear without laughing.

— Glenn Kenny