Brooklyn's Finest a Clichéd Mess

Brooklyn’s Finest, the latest from Training Day director Antoine Fuqua, is “a billy-club sandwich: three cop dramas piled one on top of the other, separated by layers of dramatic cheese," writes Ty Burr of the Boston Globe. About an hour in, “you hit gristle.” Sound appetizing? Critics agree that it’s not:

• “Thanks to the spew of chest wounds and the clatter of small-arms fire, the movie is an entertaining piece of trash,” writes Kyle Smith of the New York Post. But the script is downright ridiculous—its future is probably “on cable as a drinking game.”
• It looks like a “a star-studded epic of the streets,” writes Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle, but soon you realize it’s really just “a melodrama about three cliches in search of a bloodbath.”
• But Roger Ebert gives it a passing grade. “These are fine actors,” the Chicago Sun-Times critic writes, though “I think we become a little too conscious that they're being guided less by chance than by a screenwriter.”

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