James Gray has assembled what looks and sounds like the makings of a good, smart thriller with We Own the Night: a strong cast, serious aspirations, a specific time and place (Brooklyn, 1988). The story is shopworn, but not without dramatic potential: Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg play brothers more or less on the opposite sides of the law; Joseph (Wahlberg) has followed in the footsteps of their father (Robert Duvall) and joined the NYPD while Bobby (Phoenix) runs a seedy nightclub. With a drug dealer inching into Bobby’s territory, he is forced to reconsider his loyalties.

Alas, We Own the Night spends a lot more time seeming like a good movie than actually being one. For a film with such an ominous title, it is content to skim the surface of the NYPD, lacking the attention to detail that distinguishes other crime-heavy glimpses into bygone American eras like Gangs of New York and Zodiac. Even its period details feel incidental: though an early subtitle says so, the year doesn’t seem to be 1988 in particular but vaguely in the ’80s.

The marketing suggests a The Departed-style face-off but the film is less about Joseph than Bobby and his journey from family black sheep to, well, I won’t ruin the surprise or, more likely, the faint sense of disappointment and disbelief. Even after discounting the misleading ads, Wahlberg still has surprisingly little to do and that he plays on only one note.

It is not his fault; Joseph is only the most extreme example in a cast of characters whose relationships are defined immediately and simplistically. This leaves little to say about the performances, though everyone here gives it their best. Phoenix, Wahlberg, and Duvall are talented men, but their early scenes proceed with numbing predictability: Phoenix will act dismissive and cynical; Duvall and Wahlberg will be humourless, uptight law-abiders.
Even Bobby, supposedly one of the more dynamic people onscreen, comes off as different shades of dull, because no matter how much plot and anguish Gray lathers on, the material doesn’t come alive. It moves forward, certainly; the film isn’t exactly boring. But much of it feels unnecessary; it could be the same movie at 15 or 200 minutes as it is at 120.

It’s a shame, because Gray isn’t a bad director. His film has a couple of set pieces – a character’s trip into a drug den wearing a wire, a caravan of cop cars ambushed in the rain – that could have easily fallen flat either from familiarity or over-slick stylization.

Instead, Gray handles them with unexpected, almost quiet creepiness; they are the most memorable bits of the film. Maybe that is because the visceral action forces characters to react with immediacy, rather than with turgid demonstrations of honour, loyalty, responsibility, morality, and all the other vague quasi-themes floating through Gray’s word processor. The more We Own the Night feels like a B-movie, the more authentic it seems.

Jesse Hassenger