"We own the night"

My apologies for not having posted anything in a few weeks. I did make it back out to the movies this past weekend, and checked out the latest Wahlberg / Phoenix movie, “We own the night.” I had a pretty good idea as to how this movie would play out, what would be good, what would be bad, and what my overall impression or review would look like even before I walked in the doors, and as with about 90% of my intuitions, I was correct on almost all accounts.

“We own the night,” is about a father Burt Grusinsky (played by one of my favorite actors, Robert Duval) and his two sons, Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix) and Joseph Grusinsky (Mark Wahlberg.) Burt is a police chief in 1988 located in New York. His son Joseph has followed in his footsteps and become a respected law enforcement officer, while his other son Bobby, has gone in the complete and opposite direction, and has even discarded his last name as to not be recognized as a Grusinsky, or anything having to do with the law enforcement family.

Bobby runs a successful nightclub that is owned by a rich Russian Mob boss. His life style is hedonistic to say the least, and when his own brother raids his club because one of the Russian mob boys hangs out there, the brothers have a major falling out. I won’t go much more into the story line, but I did like the way the story line was switched up a little from the direction where you would normally expect this kind of plot to go.

Bobby’s girlfriend in this film Amanda Juarez (played by Eve Mendes) plays the typical “sex toy” she has played a dozen times before which I found most disappointing. I was hoping she had finally started making a turn towards better roles for herself. She is still beautiful, and a few scenes did have show off a little of her acting abilities, but overall this was the wrong role for her. Wahlberg’s role seems to be a duplicate of things he has done before, and was nothing special, Joaquin however found several spots in this story for his acting to shine. While the story itself was boring, and un original as most films coming out of Hollywood, Joaquin managed to carry this movie long enough to hold my interest until the end.

Writer / Director James Gray doesn’t have much previous works to compare to when looking at his bio, but I have seen much worse come out established directors this year to complain about this project. The movie overall was shot well, and had a decent look to it, but character base was to scattered, and the story line did not make well enough use out of the big names that stared in this film.

My rating for this movie is 7.00 out of 10.00