“We Own the Night”: All you need is a cement block and a deep harbor and no one will see this movie ever again

We Own the Night

We Own the Night was produced by its two stars Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix. This is a sign that they either wanted to be in a movie together or they want to take their careers firmly into their own hands, or perhaps they believed so strongly in the project that they stood behind James Gray, the writer/director. In any case, after seeing this film, I feel they should no longer be allowed to make choices concerning their careers. While, yes, being belligerently bad, I won’t go so far as saying it’s the worst movie of the year, but it certainly comes off as the most incompetent.

It’s the type of movie in which you can imagine the script italicizing certain actions for dramatic effect…”He walks past, leaving the note untouched…unread, and closes the door as he disappears into the next room.” Oh, the drama! This is an actual scene in the movie and this feels how it was directed, and performed.

We begin at the story’s humble opening (before it becomes a complete mess) in New York City of the 80’s when the police force took on the slogan “We Own the Night” as a dogma to empower their efforts in making the night safe again from drug dealers, etc. A certain party animal Bobby Green, with a glassy stone-eyed look and forced giggle Joaquin Phoenix believes are character choices, is a manager at a swinging night club where Russian drug dealers roam free. But what’s Bobby Green doing taking his sexy girlfriend Amanda Juarez, who as played by Eva Mendes is directed to be a smart sexy woman one second and a whiny little girl the next – whatever fits the story – to a policeman’s gathering? Well his brother Joseph Grusinsky, Mark Wahlberg doing nothing really, is being promoted upward within the ranks of the NYC drug task force, right underneath their pops Burt Grusinsky, Robert Duvall, who is able to take all of the bad dialogue and make it sound like his character is just an old dopey cop. But wait, isn’t Joaquin’s name Bobby Green? So how can they be related? Ah, well, Bobby has taken on his mother’s name so that no one in his work environment knows he’s related to cops…can you smell the plot twists?

They ask him to “observe” on a dastardly drug dealing villain who frequents Bobby’s night club. They actually drag him upstairs and corner him in the sanctuary of a Church, which is the most random and useless setting in the film…oh, wait, I lied, there are others…like a field of golden straw like reeds behind a dilapidated warehouse next to a river at an equestrian ranch…yeah, that’s a location in the film. But, whaaaat? Bobby doesn’t want to inform. He’ll soon change his mind when a number of cliches so hostile and contrivances so obvious decide to attack the audience. It’s the stupidity of the script that after things go horribly wrong his family apologizes to him for getting him involved in the whole thing, “The last thing I wanted was to get you involved,” but they seem to have forgotten that’s what they set out to get him to do in the sanctuary of the church in the first place.

My God, but that’s only one stupidity of a thousand stupidities. Take for instance a scene in which Bobby is under cover at a drug house wearing a wire in his lighter. Bobby is getting nervous and it shows. The Russian baddie has him empty his pockets. The Russian looks over his things carefully. Hm, Bobby has matches and a lighter? Why would anyone carry matches and a lighter on them? It’s unheard of to this Russian villain, so he, of course, opens up the lighter and finds the mic, but not before Bobby has said the special word to get the cops to come in early. They burst in, firing at everybody in sight, even Bobby! So, Bobby throws himself out a window from the third floor, and lands back first on a metal link fence. If this sequence had been made by Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park it might have been brilliant… now you understand perhaps how bad it all is.

So bad it feels like the dialogue was written by a fifth grader. The visual story elements are so heavy handed that even when the occasionally gorgeous cinematography kicks in, the James Gray ruins it. As it’s obviously raining, Bobby Green cranes his head around in the back seat of a limo and proclaims, “It’s really coming down hard.” … Gee thanks, I might have missed the rain falling if he hadn’t brought it up.

I guess if you’re looking for a good laugh it’s the best worst since Battlefield Earth

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5 Responses to ““We Own the Night”: All you need is a cement block and a deep harbor and no one will see this movie ever again”

  1. Josh Says:

    Can anything not involving Rudy Ray Moore be mentioned along with Battlefield Earth? Wow.

  2. jonathan Says:

    well, i love it. FOR ME, it’s one of the best films this year. but i respect your opinion. about the script, it doesn’t really have to be in a way you wanted it to be, because believe it or not, there are people who talk that way.

  3. Phillip Says:


    My problem with the dialogue isn’t that people maybe don’t talk that way, but that most of the dialogue in the film isn’t even necessary, and so is incredibly meaningless and pointless. Or is so obviously there to convey something specifically for the audience’s sake, making it, from a school boy’s view point, bad dialogue.

    For instance, the scene when Duvall shows up to out that Phoenix has been undercover, he walks around screaming “Where’s my son. He shouldn’t have been put undercover!” And he says it over and over again, this goes beyond the idea how a person would speak and shows that the director/writer doesn’t trust the audience enough to show Duvall maybe running to his son’s gurney and putting his arms around him. Or saying it once! Instead he has to show him screaming the same thing over and over again, treating the audience like idiots. A cop as trained as Duvall’s was would never run around screaming this, he would know better.

    And a second later this device is used again when the Russian dealer says, out loud to himself, “You’re a dead man.” Love the movie all you want, that’s fine, but I’ve never said anything like this to myself, I’ve never seen anyone say something like this to themselves. This isn’t how people talk, it’s how movie people talk when the director doesn’t trust the audience to interpret an actor’s reaction to something.

    And something I don’t speak of in the review, instating someone who’s never had Police experience to be an official policeman for the last act of the movie was probably the most contrived piece of storytelling I’ve seen in a long time. A police department would never do that. There’s no reality in this film, other than movie reality. This film is very soap operactic in the was the characters speak and act.

  4. Brendan Says:

    Finally, somebody who feels nearly as close as I am in hating this movie. How many major plot occurances have to happen in two hours, (most of which you would see coming if youve ever watched a cop movie before). Phoenix’ “father figure” owner of the club turns out to be the criminal mastermind behind the murder and attempted murder of his father and brother. His real father begins by hating his no good “druggie” son but ends dying while protecting his son. His best mate in the club turns out to betray him, ending up with the death of his father. His girlfriend leaves him, his brother is shot, his “undercover” sting goes so badly wrong and yet he ends the film as a the guy who takes out the bad guy with a shotgun in a field of 7 foot high reeds that are on fire and therefore filled with smoke. These are not in order but I mean, if he made a trilogy of films in which all of the above happened over the course of 5 or six years… then maybe it would work, over two hours of cinema and in seemingly less than a year on screen it was just ridiculous. When I came on looking for review on the film I expected nothing but bad ones, and while there are a few, the most shocking thing out there is that some people actually liked this. Its like a cop movie for a 10 year old to watch (without his parents knowledge) though I fear that maybe even some of the 10 years olds out there might spot the plot holes.

  5. Pro Video Says:

    How about the fact that they writers expect you to not be assuming that the Russian Uncle who owns the nightclub is in any way involved with his notoriously violent nephews drug trade that he runs out of HIS CLUB.

    The nephew puts a hit out on the entire cop family and when Phoenix’s father is killed the Uncle shows up at the funeral full of cops without anyone batting an eyelash or even acknowledging that he’s there.

    Of course in the end he turns out to be the main villain, which is cliche enough, but to expect that they can pull one over on the viewer by having have every character defy all common logic and assume that we’ll do the same is… well…criminal.

    Don’t even get me started on how little sense having the un-trained, pot smoking, coke snorting, screw-up main character is leading a tactical police unit at the films climax.

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