We Own The Night

Dec 14 2007 by Gary Beckwith, Evening Chronicle

(15, 117 mins) Thriller/drama. Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, Robert Duvall, Eva Mendes, Alex Veadov Director: James Gray.

JAMES Gray, writer-director of The Yards, reunites with charismatic lead stars Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg for this gritty account of betrayal and retribution, set against a backdrop of 80s New York street crime.

Like his 2000 film, We Own The Night tests the characters’ resolve with a series of thorny moral dilemmas.

In this case, the focus is a family whose estranged members operate on opposite sides of the law.

The film opens in Brooklyn in 1988 at the height of the crack epidemic. Bobby Green (Phoenix) surveys his empire, the Russian-owned nightclub El Caribe, when the NYPD bursts into the club in a raid co-ordinated by officer Joseph Grusinsky (Wahlberg) designed to entrap Russian mobster Vadim Nezhinski (Veadov).

Bobby is soon forced to choose sides when the Russian mob retaliates.

We Own The Night takes more than an hour to accelerate out of first gear, finally sparking to life during a terrific car chase in the rain.

Phoenix and Wahlberg inject testosterone by the bucketload into their feuding siblings, neither of whom are particularly sympathetic or interesting.

Duvall chews what little scenery he can get his hands on while Mendes registers purely as a sex object.

Running battles and shootouts are well co-ordinated by Gray but the final showdown is a horrible letdown.

The film is all smoke but no fire.

SWEARING; SEX; VIOLENCE