Teacher:In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Teacher: Now, understand the problem? Solve this instance: Brooklyn's Finest 
  
 March 3, 2010 
  
 Three cops, three journeys to what we suspect will be doom. No good can come of the lives they lead. They aren't bad guys, not precisely, but they occupy a world of such unremitting violence and cynicism that they're willing to do what it takes to survive. In the kind of coincidence provided only by fate or screenplays, each one will mean trouble for the other two. 
  
 Richard Gere gets top billing as Eddie, a veteran with one week left before retirement. It is a movie convention that anyone who has a week to go before retirement must die before that week is up, but Eddie seems impatient. As the film opens, he wakes up, chugs some whiskey from a bottle and points a revolver into his mouth, never a good sign. 
  
  
  
 Don Cheadle is Tango, who is completely embedded undercover in Brooklyn's toughest drug-dealing precinct, where he has blended in so well with the bad guys that it's a fine line separating him from crime. 
  
  
  
 His friend is Caz (Wesley Snipes), a dealer trying to go straight after prison; they share one of those inexplicable bonds between two tough guys causing themselves to consider each other brothers when they should really be nothing of the kind. 
  
  
  
 The third cop, Sal (Ethan Hawke), is a narc whose wife (Lili Taylor) provides him with more of a melodramatic emergency than we are perhaps prepared to believe. They have seven kids, live in a house too small for them, and the mold in the walls provokes potentially dangerous asthma attacks. Oh, and she's pregnant. With twins. 
  
  
  
 Sal has made an offer on a new place for which he cannot make the first payment. He desperately needs cash, and there's a lot of it around in his work. Tango needs to somehow use Caz and yet spare him. Eddie needs to negotiate an alcoholic haze for seven more days before he can go fishing. 
  
  
  
 The film and the actors do a good job of establishing these characters in their own lives. Indeed, the best things about "Brooklyn's Finest" are the one-on-one scenes. These are fine actors. The milieu involves a tough, poker-playing, substance-abusing, hard-bitten world where the law meets crime, and the two sides have more in common with each other than with civilians. I don't believe it's like this for most cops, but somehow it is for the great majority of movie cops. 
  
  
  
 Cheadle and Snipes have some very good scenes involving what is left unsaid but not unsuspected. Hawke has a fierce loyalty to his wife and family, and Lili Taylor does her usual touching job with what's basically a soap opera role. Hawke is especially effective in desperate scenes where he takes crazy risks because he needs to raise cash quickly. Gere's character is not as rich as the other two, is more depressed and on a more predictable trajectory. 
  
  
  
 What is rather startling is the level of the violence and killing. Although cops-vs.-drugs movies are traditionally awash in blood, "Brooklyn's Finest" demonstrates a trope I've seen with disturbing frequency: The scene in which one character lifts a firearm and peremptorily blows away another one -- almost casually or unemotionally, like cleaning house. I complained for years about the Talking Killer Syndrome, in which the shooter delays in order to explain himself to a man who will presumably be dead soon. But Instant Killers are not the answer. The fact of taking life is robbed of weight and meaning. The gun becomes the instrument of merciless self-will. 
  
  
  
 The director of "Brooklyn's Finest," Antoine Fuqua, made "Training Day" (2001), the film for which Denzel Washington won a best actor Oscar. That movie powerfully co-starred Ethan Hawke. This film has the same level of savage violence, and the same cops operating outside the same law, but the human stakes are more obvious and less convincing. The lives of the three cops intersect through a series of coincidences and inevitabilities, and I think we become a little too conscious that they're being guided less by chance than by a screenwriter. The film has a basic strength in its performances and craft, but falls short of the high mark Fuqua obviously set for himself. ||||| ‘Brooklyn’s Finest’’ is a billy-club sandwich: three separate cop dramas piled one on top of the other, separated by layers of dramatic cheese, and compressed until the condiments run together. If that doesn’t sound very appetizing, it isn’t, at least not over the course of an entire meal. But the ingredients are promising, and you can chew on the movie a good hour before you hit gristle. 
  
 A stressed NYPD lawman is at the center of each interwoven plot strand, and two out of the three leading actors do their damnedest to draw us in. Sal (Ethan Hawke), a member of Brooklyn’s rough-and-tumble antidrug squad, is a family man in an ever-tightening financial squeeze. When we meet him, he already has one foot over the line and is contemplating full surrender to corruption. Hawke, his features beginning to ravage with age, convinces us of the man’s escalating despair; Sal’s a trapped rat deciding which limb to gnaw off. 
  
 One of the drug lords he’s tracking turns out to be a cop deep undercover. Tango (Don Cheadle) has spent so many months building a street rep, in jail and out, that he’s beginning to forget why he’s there. The more his superior officer (Will Patton) refuses to bring him in from the cold, the more Tango despairs that he’ll cave in to his demons, and Cheadle uses those big, bleak eyes of his to toggle between sorrow and rage. 
  
 The film’s weak link is Eddie, a loser beat cop - burnt-out, boozy, shunned by his colleagues - who has one week to go before tossing in the towel and retiring. He’s played, in a remarkable feat of miscasting, by Richard Gere. Two decades ago, Gere resuscitated his career as an extremely bad cop in 1990’s “Internal Affairs,’’ and the surprise back then was that no one thought the pretty boy had it in him. This is different: Eddie’s a nebbish, a nobody, and Gere was born to strut. In the scenes where the character shocks rookies with his workaday cynicism, you just don’t feel the bile in his belly. 
  
 That’s three main characters in active despair - the movie’s an emotional wake. Yet where individual scenes and dilemmas convince, the whole of “Brooklyn’s Finest’’ feels increasingly cooked up. It comes to us from director Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day’’) and writer Michael C. Martin, both of whom seem to be aiming for the outer borough existentialism of a filmmaker like James Gray (“The Yards,’’ “We Own the Night’’), who himself is working from the urban template of Sidney Lumet classics like “Serpico’’ and “Q&A.’’ At this point the toner’s running out of the copier, and “Brooklyn’s Finest’’ turns contrived just when it should be charging ahead to a furious climax. 
  
 It’s furious, all right, but diffuse; I’m not giving anything away to say the three story lines ultimately don’t intersect in any meaningful way. The movie was 12 minutes longer and quite a bit darker at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, but the issue was never its downer of an original ending but how it got you there. 
  
 A New York cop movie has to earn its grit over the long haul, and despite some enjoyably hammy performances by Ellen Barkin (as a federal prosecutor), Wesley Snipes (ragged but right as Tango’s jailhouse brother), Brian F. O’Byrne (as Sal’s Jiminy Cricket), and Lili Taylor (beatifically wasted as Sal’s wife), “Brooklyn’s Finest’’ feels written rather than observed. 
  
 What’s missing is the assurance of tone that a Lumet would provide. Is it supposed to be comic that Sal has an apparently limitless number of children? Is Eddie’s final redemption heroic or ironic? Your guess is as good as mine. Unfortunately, that’s not good enough. 
  
 Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation. 
  
 © Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company. |||||
Student:
Brooklyn’s Finest, the latest from Training Day director Antoine Fuqua, is “a billy-club sandwich: three cop dramas piled one on top of the other, separated by layers of dramatic cheese," writes Ty Burr of the Boston Globe. About an hour in, “you hit gristle.” Sound appetizing? Critics agree that it’s not: “Thanks to the spew of chest wounds and the clatter of small-arms fire, the movie is an entertaining piece of trash,” writes Kyle Smith of the New York Post. But the script is downright ridiculous—its future is probably “on cable as a drinking game.” It looks like a “a star-studded epic of the streets,” writes Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle, but soon you realize it’s really just “a melodrama about three cliches in search of a bloodbath.” But Roger Ebert gives it a passing grade. “These are fine actors,” the Chicago Sun-Times critic writes, though “I think we become a little too conscious that they're being guided less by chance than by a screenwriter.”