We Own The Night
I
know a lot of you are interested in ownership of the night and wondering what
it takes to get approved for a mortgage on the night and so this new to video
movie called We Own The Night might help you in raising your down
payment and pick out curtains for when you eventually take ownership and move
into the night. The current owners of
the night are pretty much a bunch of douche bags, so you won’t have a hard time
convincing them to sell.
It
seems that this film’s writer/director, James Grey, has a unique theory on
timelines. He’s made a movie that takes
stuff from present day and stuff from the late 1970s and so he splits the
difference and sets the film in 1988. It
doesn’t work like that, James. The
film’s opening credits are accompanied by a slideshow of black and white photos
of cops from the 1940s. I guess after Planet
Terror and I Know Who Killed Me and countless other films, Grey
thought that showing the opening credits with a stripping lady was overdone and
just went with a bunch of cop dudes with potbellies from a completely different
era than the make believe 70s/present-day era in which this film is set. Bad move.
Should’ve gone with a stripper, James.
We
then cut to the actual film in the nightclub setting and get the caption
telling us that this film is set in 1988 but the song playing is ‘Heart of
Glass’ from Blondie’s Parallel Lines album released in 1978 and the people are
all wearing fashions and hairstyles from present day. Not a mullet in sight.
The
story gets going and it turns out it’s about two brothers, Joe (played by Mark Walhberg) and Bobby (played by Joaquin Phoenix) and their
father (played by Robert Duvall).
They’ve done a pretty good job at casting two guys who I don’t buy for
one second as brothers and neither of whom I buy as Robert Duvall’s son. I guess the one must resemble their dead
mother and the other probably takes after the milkman.
Joe,
like his father, is a stupid cop. Bobby
is a stupid nightclub manager who continually gets interrupted putting the
moves to his lady (played Eva Mendes).
They don’t give Eva Mendes any backstory,
motivation, or personality, so I guess you could say James Grey tailored the
part to her strengths as an actress. It
turns out that shady deals are going down involving the Russian mafia and
cocaine right in Bobby’s nightclub, so Bobby’s cop family recruit him to work
for them infiltrating the Russian mafia.
I
guess they figure he’d make an ideal detective since he has been completely
oblivious to the fact that everybody around him is involved in the drug trade,
even a couple ten-year-old kids he plays with.
It’s practically the fucking Wicker
Man how many people are involved. He also has skills such as drug and
alcohol problems, a flair for spousal abuse, a potbelly and slouch denoting
poor physical fitness, and he panics really easily and makes poor
decisions. He actually even writes the
police exam while drunk and beating his lady at the same time and still passes,
the mark of a natural born cop.
Actually,
the part where he’s drunk and writing the police exam is the only scene where
he’s clearly drunk and out of control, so it might just be backstage footage of
Joaquin Phoenix that accidentally ended up in the movie and not part of the
character as detailed in James Grey’s script.
But
they make him some sort of probationary cop, which means he doesn’t get a
pistol. I mean,
what the fuck? You’re in or you’re out,
you’re not just a gun-less cop. I could
see if Joaquin Phoenix was doing that same sissy accent he did in Gladiator
they might just figure he was English and would only want a baton like the bobbies in England, but he’s talking like a regular American
in this movie. Where’s his right to bare
arms?
The
part where he goes undercover to the Russian mafia cocaine factory is where we
get some real timewarping. Remember that this movie supposedly takes
place in 1988, but if you look at Lethal Weapon, a movie about narcs that was made around the same time, the inaccuracies
of We Own the Night become even more apparent. In We Own the Night they give Phoenix
a cigarette lighter that holds a GPS device, a radio microphone, and actually
functions as a lighter. Not even James
Bond would get all that in one place. If
you look that early mobile phone they cart around in Lethal Weapon the
thing is bigger than my nan’s
handbag. I mean, in 1988 undercover work
practically involved getting a guy in camouflage to hold a boon mic over your head while a third guy pulled the wagon with
the reel-to-reel recorder behind. That’s
why Riggs and Murtaugh just shot everybody,
cases were just too much effort to build.
But Bobby learns that lesson in this film too.
This
film has a couple of action sequences, though it never really feels like an
action feature. One happens when he
first goes undercover to the Russian mafia cocaine factory and things get tense
so he uses his 007 lighter to call in backup who just storm in and shoot
everybody. It made me laugh how the main
evil Russian escapes though a little passage behind the fridge, and he actually
resets the fridge behind him and scurries down the foxhole looking like a
little Hobbit or something.
There’s
a car chase where the cops are all driving in a convoy and the mafia drive up
in a car alongside and shoot at them.
The driver of Bobby’s car gets shot and for some reason Bobby takes over
at the wheel and keeps driving recklessly against the grain of traffic just so
he can get back alongside the mafia car and let them take another couple shots
at him. At this point Bobby has no
weapon so I can’t figure out why he did this other than to witness his father get
shot in the vehicle ahead. The only
thing I can think of is maybe his lighter also contained a rocket launcher but
he just couldn’t get a clear shot at the mafia car, but they never even showed
him trying to aim the lighter at the mafia car.
So maybe he just couldn’t stop driving because he couldn’t find a
parking space, it is New York.
Then
we get the final shootout, and still they don’t give Bobby a gun. He’s sitting there in a bush staking out the
Russian mafia cottage, surrounded by a SWAT team, but they still expect him
fight with strong language or something.
But when Joe has a nervous breakdown they tell Bobby to pick up his
shotgun, so maybe it was a resource issue, they just didn’t have anymore guns the
week Bobby joined the force.
But
the cops in this movie are pretty stupid.
Not as bad as those cops in Highlander, but pretty crappy. There’s an assassination attempt on Joe and
they say that it is ‘clearly a professional job’, but I actually saw
this other movie about a professional named Leon called Leon: The
Professional and there’s no way this would meet his standards. Leon had some pretty simple rules about
putting two bullets minimum into a guy and confirming the kill. But these guys wear vision-inhibiting burlap
sacks on their heads and only shoot Joe once, and he survives. Instead of sticking around to take his pulse
or put a second bullet in Joe, they use the time to torch his car. So unless the hit was actually on Joe’s car,
I’d fire these guys and call Leon, or at least his apprentice, Matilda. I doubt these sackhead
guys could even deliver the pizza that Matilda was pretending to when she
successfully smuggled a bag full of firearms into the police station.
There’s
even a part where they can’t figure out where the Russian Mafioso does his big
deals. Bobby suggests that they check
out a secluded place the Mafioso routinely visited, but the other cops treat it
like a pointless longshot and Bobby really has to
twist their arms to get them out of their chairs.
The
final shootout has a bit of tension since it is during the day, and these
characters own the night, so they’re out of their element and possibly
trespassing. But Bobby prevails by going
wide. He sets the entire field where the
Mafioso might be on fire. But then just
walks into the fire and shoots the guy anyway.
I guess back in the 1980s environmentalism wasn’t so big and when you
think of how long it takes to cook a turkey let alone a full-sized Russian you
can see why Bobby just cuts to the chase.
There’s
a bit of good dialogue, or actually more like two good lines. Duvall says something about how you can only
stay warm for so long by pissing your pants.
I love urine analogies. Plus, Joe
has a cool line about how it’s better to be judged by twelve than carried by
six, which shows he can count therefore explaining why he’s the ‘top cop’ of
this bunch. And I was really surprised
that at no point in the film does anybody say “We own the night.” There might be more good dialogue that I
missed because Joaquin Phoenix’s speech gets so slurred in the second half of
this movie I almost needed the subtitles.
I
guess the message of the movie is about how brothers can be different, but then
they become alike, and Russians are bad, and when in doubt set a field on
fire. I think James Grey had some
interesting ideas here about brotherhood being stretched across the lines of
the law, but it’s kinda hard to develop those themes
when one brother is in a coma most of the movie and the other is played by a
drunk actor and the one brother isn’t even technically a criminal and becomes a
cop as soon as he’s asked to and so most of the movie is just two brother cops
who don’t look or talk alike or are in comas and never experiencing any tension
or ethical dilemma.
As
far as I’m concerned, I’ll probably keep renting the night. I’ve got a good lease and I’m just not the
commitment type. And as far as movies
about a bunch of incompetent cops running around New York in the 1980s trying
to kill an evil Russian guy with a crazy hairstyle, I’d say Highlander
trumps We Own the Night hands down.
But if you like movies that don’t really have themes, or entertainment,
or a clear setting in terms of time period, or a point, you might want to check
this one out. It has a Russian with
funny hair scurrying into foxhole behind a fridge and that’s worth something.
If you liked this, here are some
other recommended articles:
The most in-depth analysis of this groundbreaking film franchise
in the world.
There can be only one.
(current sequel count: 4)
My attempt at writing a Mark Wahlberg
movie.