New Movie Review: We Own the Night

An official Cannes Film Festival selection this year, We Own the Night is a pretty straight-forward cop drama. It stars Joaquin Phoenix as a man torn between obligations to family and to business. Mark Wahlberg and Robert Duvall play his brother and father, respectively. They are police officers assigned to the very division that would seek to undermine Phoenix's business. That business involves drug deals out of the night club he runs. It seems that Russians are the organized crime go-to culture this year (see Eastern Promises), as it is a Russian crime family behind all of the dealings in said nightclub.

This is the basic set-up for a movie that feels pretty similar to a lot of other police movies put together. It does not have the humor of a Lethal Weapon movie or the heart pounding thrills of a police procedural like Zodiac. It lacks the visceral energy of The Departed, a movie to which it has been compared quite a bit. I am not sure that I really see the comparisons, but you can judge that for yourself.

There are few nice set pieces, like a rain soaked car chase at about the mid-way point and some hazy moments near the end. However, writer-director James Gray (Little Odessa and The Yards) never holds the tension long enough for the audience to get the effect he wants us to. It is rare that a movie is too short, but We Own the Night would have benefitted from a few extended sequences. Instead, Gray opts for the immediate thrill, which is often less satisfying and sometimes too easy.

Duvall and Wahlberg give solid performances, and Eva Mendes is fine as the wishy-washy girlfriend. But, the movie rests almost entirely on the shoulders of Joaquin Phoenix. His is the story we follow, and he is the one about whom we care. He has shown, most notably in Walk the Line, that he is perfectly capable of carrying a movie, and he does an admirable job here. He is able to overcome much of Gray's shaky, uneven writing and pulls a solid performance out of an average movie.

Fans of the genre will enjoy this film. Fans of Joaquin Phoenix will enjoy this film. People who are neither of those will probably not. There is nothing terribly new or interesting here. It may be better to rent any one of the various police movies from the mid to late eighties that this film seems to model itself after so much. However, is it a worthy addition to that class of film? Yes.

See it?

Yes.