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We Own The Night Review

We Own The Night reunites director James Gray with two of the stars of his crime drama The Yards, Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg. The film, penned by Gray, takes its title from the motto of the NYPD's 1980s street crimes unit. Set in 1988, the story follows Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix), the manager of El Caribe -- a Russian-owned nightclub in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach. He lives a carefree life with his beloved girlfriend Amanda (Eva Mendes), spending every night in a drug-induced haze of music and partying. Bobby, however, is not who he seems; his real surname is Grusinsky and he's the black sheep son in a family of NYPD officers. Bobby's brother, Joseph (Wahlberg), and dad, Burt (Robert Duvall), are veteran cops out to bring down the burgeoning Russian mob -- a mission that leads them to raid El Caribe. This bust not only enrages Bobby, but also incurs the wrath of vicious gangster Vadim Nezhinski (Alex Veadov) who seeks to get even with the cops who crossed him. After Vadim retaliates, Bobby and Amanda find themselves caught in a war between the cops and the mob. Bobby finally chooses which side he's on and tries to make amends by helping the cops target Vadim, who doesn't realize Bobby is actually a Grusinsky. [ignvideo]object_ID=954930&downloadURL=http://moviesmovies.ign.com/movies/video/article/812/812858/we_own_night_091407_flvlowwide.flv[/ignvideo] We Own The Night employs one of the oldest and most melodramatic chestnuts of the crime genre -- friends/siblings who find themselves on opposite sides of the law -- which has been done in everything from Angels With Dirty Faces to the current Showtime series Brotherhood. (This hoary cliche actually has a basis in fact, as anyone from certain neighborhoods in New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia could tell you.) Thankfully, Gray's characters are weighty and dimensional enough to allow the viewer to overlook the generic nature of the story. Gray also manages to spice up such familiar genre set-pieces as a

Published: 2007-10-11
Provider: IGN
Keywords: We Own The Night reviews, review