We Own the Night

Objective Rating (How much merit I think it deserves):
5/10
Subjective Rating (How much I personally like it):
4/10

Year released: 2007
Runtime: 117 minutes
IMDB page: here

A typical The Departed police drama wannabe. All the more tragic for the fact that it gets kind of close, only to fail epically.

Plot: Bobby (Joaquin Phoenix) is managing a hot shady nightclub in NYC for a Russian family. There's a bit of drugs involved, and Bobby is a user, but nothing too major, or so Bobby thought. He is a pretty decent person and has a long-term Puerto Rican girlfriend (Eva Mendes) whom he's genuinely in love with. But Bobby has a bit of dark family history: unknown to his circle of club friends, his father (Robert Duvall) is the police chief and his brother (Mark Wahlberg) is the police captain leading the narcotics team targeting the nightclub for some heavy drug trafficking. Caught between the two, where would Bobby's alliance come down?

Cast: Very respectable group of actors. Which makes this flop of a film even more puzzling. The acting is fine, really not the aspect causing all the problems for the film.

Script: I guess that's where the problem lies. The story is a bit ridiculous. The son of the police chief can end up managing a club for the Russian mafia? Why? You'd think the mafia is a tad bit better informed than that. The script really doesn't dive into the characters the way The Departed does. None of the characters are explored too deeply, and a lot of them are very vague and flat, like the girlfriend with the emphasized Puerto Rican background, a piece of information that just sticks out like a sore thumb because you really don't find out anything else about her. There's basically no history for any of the characters, and therefore you have a hard time caring for them.

Production: um, nothing remarkable. And also, I didn't get to see the special features to get to know the film better. Sorry.

The title is really vague overall. I still don't get what exactly it means, beyond the obvious. Maybe I didn't give the movie enough of a chance, because the whole time I was thinking "ugh, when does this end, cuz I really don't care how it all goes down..." The more terrible kind of gangster movie: boring and bland.