Broken City

 

Allen Hughes' Broken City is pretty much everything you think of a movie being released in January.  It's not all that original, it's not very exciting, and it features some highly paid actors who obviously should have known better.  To be fair, there is a workable idea for a political thriller here.  It's simply lost amongst the murkiness of the screenplay, which includes subplots being dropped without warning, and characters popping in and out of the narrative seemingly at random.  All in all, this has all the makings of something that was at one time a fairly hot studio project at one time that got diluted little by little into a generic and forgettable film.

The usually likable Mark Wahlberg is seemingly stripped of all charisma here as police detective Billy Taggart who, as the film opens, is on trial for killing a man who is believed to have a history of rape charges, although he was never formally prosecuted, due to a lack of evidence.  The city is seemingly in an uproar over Billy's decision to take the law into his own hands.  However, does have a few vocal supporters, chief amongst them being New York Mayor Hostetler (Russell Crowe), who considers him a hero.  Billy is exonerated of his crimes, but due to the fact some key evidence had to be covered up during the trial, he must give up his position with the police.  We catch up with Billy seven years later, where he's now a private investigator for hire.  He's struggling to overcome a drinking addiction, is trying to make life work with his live-in girlfriend, an aspiring movie actress named Natalie (Natalie Martinez), and basically is just trying to keep his business afloat.

It's about this time that Hostetler calls Billy in for a private meeting in his office.  He wants Billy to follow his wife, Cathleen (Catherine Zeta-Jones), whom he suspects is having an affair.  He offers Billy payment of $50,000 for photos of his wife's lover, so he can keep the story under control, and make sure it doesn't blow up in his face during the upcoming Mayoral election, which is only days away.  Billy starts to follow Cathleen's every move, and thinks he has come across the man she is seeing behind her husband's back.  Naturally, things are not what they seem, and Billy is soon drawn into something much bigger and more corrupt than he imagined.  In a normal film, this is where the plot would start to thicken, but Broken City is so strangely muted in its suspense and tension, we find that we could possibly care less.

I already talked briefly about Wahlberg, and how he just feels off with his performance.  There's no anger or intensity, not even when he begins to realize what he's up against.  Sadly, he's not the only big name in the cast who, for one reason or another, decided to leave their talent at home.  Russell Crowe fairs better as the very cool and calculating Mayor Hostetler, but it's a fairly one-note performance.  He's all cool and all calculating all the time, so we immediately know that something's up as soon as he appears on camera.  He could have been interesting, but the movie keeps him off camera oddly for most of its running time.  Equally put to very little use is Catherine Zeta-Jones, in the fairly thankless role as his wife.  Despite the stormy relationship that is supposed to be building between her and her husband, she oddly has no big dramatic scene with Crowe, and is usually kept in the background for most of her scenes.

The one performance that does manage to stand out belongs to Alona Tal, who plays Billy's smart-mouthed and loyal assistant.  She brings life whenever she's on the screen, due to the fact she's the only person on screen with a personality and a sense of humor.  Everyone else is forced to act like they know they're in a thriller.  They play by the rules.  They exist simply to step in and out of the shadows, deposit some exposition, and then slink away.  There are some throwaway characters, such as Billy's girlfriend, Natalie, who mainly exists simply so Wahlberg can have a breakdown that leads him back to drinking (a plot that's never really resolved, and holds no bearing).  Everybody's a slave to this plot, and exist solely to be manipulated by it.  This is thriller writing at its most basic level, because the writer isn't smart enough to give these characters real lives or motivations, other than to pull us, the audience, in various directions.

 

Broken City covers no new ground when it comes to corrupt politics, but that would not even be a problem if the script had anything interesting to say, or some characters we could relate to.  Maybe this project started with very good intentions.  Actually, I'm positive it did.  But, somewhere along the line, whether it be in the script or in the editing room, all character and life was removed.  Because of this, we're left with a very generic film that most likely had way too much money thrown at it.

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