You can kinda tell from the title that this is going to be naff – it’s got a ring to it more suited to the back of a Love Heart than the wall of your local multiplex. But here it is, James Gray’s long-time-coming follow-up to 2000’s The Yards (he’s really got a problem with those titles), and it achieves a level of mediocrity with which only canned food can hope to contend.
The year is 1988 and the (predominantly Russian) owners of various New York nightclubs have got wise to the fiscal advantage off pushing smack, crack and gak while nubile hotties shotgun Drambuie and shake their booty to the latest Styx album as the contents of their mink purses are quietly siphoned off to fund shady drug-running ops.
Bobby (Joaquin Phoenix) is in the privileged position of running one such club, much to the chagrin of his antsy bro’ Joseph (Mark Wahlberg, rehashing his role as Shouty Tough #2 from The Departed), a cop with a serious hankering to dish out some cell-time to those Ruskie bastards who’re corrupting The Kidz and getting away clean. Their slow-burn sibling rivalry finally comes to a head when Joseph busts into one of the clubs on the trail of a dealer, which in turn forces a moral dilemma on to Bobby: does he shop his kid brother to a bunch of nasty Eastern crims, or give up an empire which has taken years to build?
We Own The Night may be a crap title, but frankly, even if it was called Downtown Shakedown at the Eighties Russian Drug Club, you’d still leave the cinema thinking that ‘generic’ just isn’t the word. A very decent car chase aside, this is one cop thriller in dire need of some original thinking.
