We Own the Night Review

Then a friend and very talented writer, film critic declared the movie one of the best of 2007 and he said he might even go on record as saying the movie was better than The Godfather?

I took the statement with a grain of salt, but obviously this film is something I needed to see.

It is now out on DVD.

No, it isn't anywhere close to being as good as The Godfather, but if you were sick of The Godfather and you completely identify with the relationship of the two brothers played by Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix ,  you might like it a lot more than I did.

I want movies to get details right-unless they are made for so little money, they simply couldn't be concerned with getting things right.

We Own the Night has a big budget and it's supposed to be an epic, part of a trilogy of films from the director that includes Little Odessa, and The Yards.   

Well, right off the bat a title tell us it is 1988.  As we enter the very hot happening Brighton Beach Brooklyn nightclub, Blondie's Heart of Glass sets the mood.  Characters are established It's a song that has been used in a lot of movies to set the mood.  It has done it in cable shows, a couple of t.v. movies as well.  It's been over-used to the point of it being a cliché.

It's also a 1978 song.   If the club was doing a retro night, the song might have been played, otherwise it is more likely the DJ would be spinning things like Wild Wild West, or Robert Palmer's Simply Irresistible, Madonna, or Michael Jackson's The Way You Make Me Feel or George Michael, Samantha Fox or even an INXS number. 

Thankfully if you ignore the poor choices of music (we also hear Bowie's 1983 Let's Dance used prominently as music people in the club are dancing too) meant to be played in a very hot New York club in 1988, you'll discover a fairly familiar story of cops versus gangsters with a nice twist.

In this case the ‘gangsters' are  Russian drug dealers who have set up shop in the Brighton Beach, Brooklyn nightclub Caribe that is managed by Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix).  His father is a deputy police chief (Robert Duvall) and his brother is Joseph Grusinsky (Mark Wahlberg) who has just been promoted to NYPD's narcotics unit.    Joaquin uses his mother's maiden name to give him some distance from his well known cop family.  Even the Russians who own the club don't know that Bobby's dad is a deputy police chief.

Bobby is the black sheep of the family.  A loose, liberal, drug taking, manager of a nightclub with a Puerto Rican girlfriend (Eve Mendez).

Like his brother Joseph, Bobby has gotten a promotion of sorts, club owner Marat Buzhayev (Moni Moshonov) wants Bobby to open and manage another club perhaps in Queens, Bobby gets the okay to find a place and make a proposal to open a club in Manhattan.  Marat's nephew Vadim Nehzinski (Alex Veadov) is supposedly about to land a big shipment of drugs and Bobby's brother and father want Bobby to know they are looking at his club. 

The worlds will collide and the repercussions will force Bobby to make some very tough decisions-help the good guys or live his life in the fast lane.   The decision is nearly made for him when something nearly tragic occurs. 

There are three superb set pieces in the film.  The raid on Bobby's club, a unique car chase that is filmed almost entirely out of one car's windshield and from Bobby's perspective, with the predominate sound being the rhythm of  windshield wipers-no fast cutting, no loud music, no wild CGI help....  and a scene that begins as a tour of a drug house but ends much differently.

Despite the movie's considerable flaws the acting by all of the principle characters and particularly Joaquin Phoenix, is among the best ensembles in any movie of the last several years.   The drug dealing and Russian mob elements feel clichéd and forced, and some of the details are not right-but it's still a film worth seeing. 

The look of the film is closer to film noir, rain, dark blues, working class, although inside the club there mood and lighting is old world decadent gold and rich red. t's far removed from the burned yellow and warm reds of the much more operatic Godfather films.  Coppolla's film gives everything a renaissance painting glow-while this film has an up to date Michael Mann wet city look.

The look quite frankly in We Own the Night doesn't match the 1988 era, but makes us feel we are in an up to do date setting.  The result is that we focus on the family relationships which fuel and give some weight to the three superb set pieces.   Gray's made the right choice in how he made the movie look.

I can't say too much more without giving away some important plot details which might spoil the film for you.   Direct Gray is good at capturing wonderful little moments in the body language of his actors or by positioning his camera and adjusting his frames so that we can see moments between characters as if we were watching real brothers, real lovers, real people.  Some of these moments might make you feel just a bit uncomfortable-but that's because we aren't used to seeing this kind honesty captured on film-particularly ones that are cops and robber tales.   Unfortunately Gray doesn't always pay enough attention to period details-so you might be bugged by the music being used or other conceits that remind us... it's a movie.

We Own the Night is about people realizing the choices they make matter to the important people in their life. Wrong choices can affect entire families.  There are themes of loyalty, betrayal and redemption.    Not a lot of overly played theatrics is on display here which makes this movie a little slow to some who demand as much cartoonish flash in their movies as they can get.  A few lines are over-written-but that's easy enough to forgive.  

We Own the Night  2007  Directed by David Gray