The folks out at Anchor Bay sent me a copy of Brooklyn’s Finest, and it’s actually really good, but not as good as it might have been.

Brooklyn’s Finest is about pretty much what it says on the box, a coterie of Brooklyn cops sent to clean up the city’s infamous BK housing complex, but the further the three cops get into the assignment, the more they find out just how corrupt their department really is.  The three find themselves drawn to the same crime scene, and when all three come together, something’s going to happen to unify them all permanently…or possibly kill them.

One of the greatest parts of Brooklyn’s Finest is how incredible a job they do of justifying the assorted acts of illegality the cops engage in.  One cop’s pregnant wife has asthma and is living in a house full of mold, thus the cop in question wants to snatch up a little drug money so he can afford the down payment on a nice house.  It’s hard to disagree with such a ploy until you realize, oh wait, it’s ILLEGAL.

But there’s a substantial problem with Brooklyn’s Finest–it’s wildly disjointed.  While it does do a terrific job of making the cops into sympathetic figures that we’re all more than eager to permit to steal drug money lest it slip into the hands of some high-ranking city pusbag, it fails substantially in its narrative because it’s literally all over the map.  Sure, there are some common threads holding the different storylines together, but there are huge stretches where they focus on one or the other, leaving us twisting in the wind, wondering what, if anything, is going on with the other plotlines.

This is a problem, and a pretty substantial one, but what’s left here is pretty enjoyable.  It’s a great and gripping crime drama, and a powerhouse performance backed up by a powerhouse cast.  Don Cheadle’s good in pretty much anything, and you tack on Richard Gere and Wesley Snipes and you come out vastly ahead.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Brooklyn’s Finest a bit of a pass–despite the fact that the narrative is pretty shoddily assembled, the end result is still pretty nice–and thus hands over a seven out of ten.