Phoenix is fine,
his film’s so-so

At the Movies
By Senitra Horbrook

Throughout We Own the Night, Joaquin Phoenix is dressed in black, but he’s not the man in black. That didn’t stop me from thinking he may burst into song and Reese Witherspoon would join him onstage for a duet.
Of course, that never happens, but Phoenix has the same captivating presence as he did in Walk the Line, thus owning the crime drama We Own the Night.
Although I found We Own the Night to be rather slow and gloomy, the astounding performance of Phoenix can’t be denied. He plays Bobby Green, a club manager with a fondness for drugs and pretty ladies (Eva Mendes is the Latina on his arm). Bobby comes from a family of law enforcement, but he is content to remain on the wrong side of the tracks, using his mother’s maiden name (Green) instead of his father’s name (Grusinsky) so the club’s owners have no clue of his ties to the law.
Both Bobby’s brother and father are upstanding officers for the New York Police Department. Mark Wahlberg modifies his Boston cop from The Departed to the similar persona of a New York cop to play the brother, Joseph Grusinsky, while Robert Duvall plays patriarch Burt Grusinsky.
The three leading characters don’t even look like distant relatives let alone a father and his two sons. Alas, I guess that minor detail didn’t matter much to writer/director James Gray. I guess Gray was pleased enough with the performances of Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg in his 2000 movie, The Yards, that he wanted to reunite them in another movie.
Anyhow, conflict arises in We Own the Night when Bobby is forced to choose between the family he has blood ties to and his nightclub family, which unfortunately are Russian drug dealers the NYPD is trying to bust. The movie takes place in the late 1980s, when a new wave of drugs was taking lives across the city.
We Own the Night has two memorable scenes — a rainy car chase and a suspenseful attempted drug bust. Who knew a lighter could create so much drama? Well, it does during the drug-bust scene. Besides those two scenes and Phoenix’s performance as a conflicted man, there’s not much I enjoyed about this movie.
Wahlberg’s performance is not nearly as impressive as his Oscar-nominated one from last year’s The Departed.
As the girlfriend, Mendes’ character hangs around way longer than I’d expect any woman without a ring on her finger to, especially since her life is in danger a good portion of the film. Mendes (Ghost Rider, Hitch) puts in a good performance, although, at times, she is kind of whiny.
The fact that the movie is slow makes it easy to focus on minor details, which I would not have been doing if I’d been truly engrossed. Maybe an oversight on Gray’s part, but the movie makes it seem like disco was still in its heyday in 1988, playing Blondie in the club and talking about another club with an all-disco floor.
Another error I found was that when a character in the movie gets shot point-blank in the face, he winds up only with a small scar on his neck.
As far as crime drama/gangster movies go, We Own the Night is perfectly entertaining for two hours. The movie’s fatal flaw is that it’s not one of those flicks you’ll be thinking about days — or even hours — after you see it. ••
Movie Grade: B-