We Own the Night

We Own the Night
Studio: Sony
Rated: R
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg
Director: James Gray
WorkNameSort: We Own the Night
Our Rating: 3.00
Writer/director James Gray is an auteur by thematic preoccupation only. Every six years or so, he’ll eke out an urban crime thriller imbued with tough, street-wise clarity, but his work is defined as much by formal anonymity as it is narrative consistency. His latest film, We Own the Night, is a competent, quasi-profound but ultimately shopworn tale of familial loyalty, directed with television-drama flatness. Mark Wahlberg is the good brother, a policeman on New York’s mean streets; in a major part, he isn’t half as memorable as he was in his tertiary role as a cop in The Departed. Joaquin Phoenix is the bad brother, a sleazy nightclub owner whose patrons include the Russian drug lords the police are trying to shut down. Phoenix has to play both sides to save his brother’s life, going undercover as a police mole. We Own the Night is an all-you-can-steal buffet of cop-movie clichés cobbled from Scorsese forgeries, from the predictable “He’s wearing a wire!” revelation to the shady drug exchange in an abandoned building to the at-all-cost avenging of a key character’s death to the film’s treatment of women. But Gray does maneuver brilliantly around the action scenes, one-upping even The French Connection in an exasperating rain-soaked car-chase and staging an extraordinary apartment-building shootout.

This article appears in Oct 10-16, 2007.