Family expectations are rough. Bobby Green is a disappointment to his father Bert, who loves and respects his other son Joe. Bobby is a club manager, living the high life with his gorgeous Puerto Rican girlfriend Amada. Any father would be disappointed with an aging party animal only into booze and drugs; but when your father is the deputy chief of police, it's a scandalous embarrassment.
Bobby, played by Joaquin Phoenix as a bratty teen, has taken his mother's name, in his line of work you can' be trusted if you have the same last name as a top cop. His cocky attitude and disrespect for everything his father and brother stand for seem like petty rebellion from a kid who has always felt second rate. But when Joe, played by Mark Wahlberg with his signature no-BS attitude, raids Bobby's club to get at drug pusher Vadim Nezhinski (Alex Veadov), it starts in motion of feud between the cops and drug dealers, which Bobby finds himself firmly in the middle of.
Robert Duvall plays the father and Eva Mendes (GHOST RIDER) plays Bobby's girlfriend. But this is Bobby's story and Phoenix gives the most interesting performance. Despite his conflicts with his family, Bobby still loves them. But what risks is he willing to take to help them? Would he risk his career? Would he risk his life? Would he give it all up?
Director/writer James Gray deals with these issues in a compelling way… at first. Toward the end, the film takes a leap into fantasyland, in a move that seems only used to put a gun in a certain character's hand and justify a clichéd shootout. Having worked with Wahlberg and Phoenix on his previous crime drama THE YARDS, he gets good performances from his past collaborators and elicits Mendes best performance to date. However, as the plot moves towards its close, it gets lazy, and all the good work the actors do to makes us care about their characters is lost as contrivance takes over the lead role. We're taken out of what up until this point had been a compelling story. What felt like a genuine story about fathers and sons and cops and criminals has now become a crime movie screenplay.
With the ending turn, Gray takes a risk to do something different that just doesn't work. The beginning and acting is good enough to drag us through till the end, but we don't care as much as we did. It's like someone telling you an elaborate story about some crazy event that just happened to them. It has you captivated until the teller gets to one spot that exposes the whole thing as a lie. It's still a good yarn, but something fells false about it nonetheless.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
