Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

Here’s another one I have to prepare my own review for. Capone, as always, shames me with his machine-like ability to always have his reviews ready for Friday. On a day like today, with 499947837 new films opening, it’s hard to organize what goes up when.

I’m off to see ENCHANTED right now, and as soon as I’m back, I’ll continue putting up my own stuff. For now, here’s our man in Chi-town, my brother in rooflessness, the one and only Capone.

Hey folks. Capone in Chicago here.

No New York City cop cliché is left unused in this competently made but otherwise uninspired work from writer-director James Gray (LITTLE ODESSA; THE YARDS) about the deteriorating crime problem in the Big Apple circa the early 1980s. Joaquin Phoenix plays Brooklyn nightclub manager Bobby Green, whose El Caribe hot spot is frequented by Russian drug dealers and mobsters. Bobby allows this element to roam free because it brings in business and the club's owner treats Bobby like a son. Bobby's smokin' hot girlfriend Amada (Eva Mendes in full vixen mode) can't get enough of the guy, and together they play the King and Queen of the Brooklyn nightlife with much vigor. But right from the start, WE OWN THE NIGHT kicks in with the "how-cool-can-we-make-these-people-look" attitude. In one of his less impressive roles, Phoenix walks around with a smarmy sneer to the infectious beats of Blondie or some other disco-era tunes. He snorts a little something here, mashes faces with his girl over there, and rubs elbows with some scary-looking, leather-jacket-wearing Russian thugs. Never seen that before.

What many of Bobby's buddies (including the truly obnoxious Danny Hoch, who plays his right-hand man) don't know is that he comes from a family of top-ranking, highly decorated cops, including his chief of police father (Robert Duvall) and his rising-star brother, Joseph (Mark Wahlberg). Neither father nor brother hides the fact that they are sorely disappointed in Bobby's choice of profession or friends, a point underscored when Joseph leads a raid of El Caribe and arrests some Russian mobster types.

Most of what happens in WE OWN THE NIGHT from this point forward is a series of revenge killings or attempted kilings. The Russians attempt to kill Joseph; the police enlist Bobby to help them catch the people that put the hit out on his brother; Bobby and Amada go into protective custody and immediately become targets along with Bobby's father. There isn't a step of this plot that isn't completely predictable or executed in ways we've seen a hundred times before in far better movies. Phoenix looks pale and sweaty all the time; Wahlberg has rarely been as good as he was in last year's THE DEPARTED, so why would he play another cop role in such a lesser movie? Mendes fares a bit better as the sex kitten who quickly loses her interest in Bobby once he falls out of favor and the money goes away. At least her performance is somewhat believable. Duvall couldn't turn in bad work if he tried, but he gives us a familiar take on the stubborn, set-in-his-ways dad character that adds very little to the proceedings.

To director Gray's credit, there is one chase sequence that takes place during a nasty rainstorm that is breathtaking. Filmed primarily from a point of view inside Bobby's car, we see crashes and near misses going on around his vehicle but without the deafening sounds that typically accompany these events. It's almost silent, and for some reason that makes what we're seeing so much more terrible.

Without giving too much away, by the time the story gets to the point where Bobby makes a major career detour, I lost interest, and not just because that moment in the script seemed implausible. No, I stopped caring about anything or anyone in this movie because it was trying too hard to throw too many plot devices at us in one film. What's worse, I never really liked or cared about anyone in this movie. Everyone is kind of an asshole and not the fun kind you invite to a party to keep things interesting. A little self-centered behavior goes a hell of a long way. It's not a good sign when you throw up your hands and say to yourself, "I've officially stopped caring about these people from this point forward."

WE OWN THE NIGHT takes its title from the motto that the Street Crimes Unit of the NYPD used during the 1980s. A film about that unit's seedy misadventures might have been worth putting camera to, but this is yet another sketchy, surface-skimming cop movie with generic mobsters, family-trumps-everything, cops-protect-cops crime thriller that we've seen more times than my limited memory capacity can sustain. I expected better from nearly everyone involved and was let down at every turn.

Capone