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Director James Gray may be challenging Terrence Malick in the productivity stakes; We Own the Night is his third film in 13 years, compared to Malick's four in 32 (he's still got to slow down a bit, then). Here he displays an assured, if not particularly distinctive, talent behind the camera, cranking out an engrossing slow-burn tale of cops and crime in 1980s Brooklyn, New York. Nobody is ever going to accuse We Own the Night of being original - even just comparing it with recent films, it in some ways resembles American Gangster (the New York setting and drugs theme), Eastern Promises (Russian mobsters) and The Departed (two main characters on either side of the law). Unsurprisingly, it is not up to the Oscar-winning standard of the latter, but is a considerable improvement over Cronenberg's dull Promises and is of a similar quality to American Gangster overall. Despite its many clear influences, though, it manages to rise above mere imitation and becomes excellent in its own right. Woods attempts to go for the gritty seventies thriller feel, and mostly succeeds.
The cast list gets the film off to a good start. The veteran Robert Duvall is usually a reliable marker of quality, and even in lesser films generally gives creditable showings. Likewise Joaquin Phoenix's career has gone from strength to strength since his starmaking turn as the villain of Gladiator, perhaps peaking with his superb portrayal of Johnny Cash in Walk the Line. If "Marky Mark" Wahlberg's career has been a little less consistent, he has been very solid in recent years, particularly in the aforementioned The Departed in which he stole every scene he appeared in. In We Own the Night the three play a family - Duvall's the father, and the other two are brothers, if that wasn't obvious enough. Duvall is an aging police chief, and Wahlberg's Joseph has taken after him by joining the force and doing his father proud. Phoenix's Bobby, on the other hand, is the black sheep of the family, running a seedy nightclub frequented by Russian gangsters and taking part in drug deals. However, events don't take an entirely predictable course, resulting in a film that engages with some decent twists.
Proceedings are punctuated by the occasional action scene, but there are relatively few of them, which may put off some. Mostly the film is a rather slow-moving character-driven piece, but the acting and characterisation is good enough to make it work (unfortunately Eva Mendes is just good-looking window dressing, however). When the excitement does arrive, it's more in the form of sustained tension than wham-bang pyrotechnics, as exemplified in the climactic shoot-out. One of the more noteworthy sequences and possibly the highlight of the film is a car chase with a difference - the difference being that it's in a torrential downpour, and most of it is shot from the perspective of one character, meaning that the rain on the car windscreen blurs our view and puts us right in the thick of the action. It's quite an adrenaline rush. Moments like these, and some well-written dialogue (Gray also wrote the script) - Duvall in particular has some great lines - keep the film entertaining and pretty gripping for the duration.
The summary
A considered and well-constructed thriller that deserves more notice than it has received.
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