“Huh. I noticed something while pasting The Last Stand into my full list of write ups. There’s a lot of “”The Last”” movies. I’ve written up The Last American Virgin, Exorcism, Picture Show, Station, and now Stand. The only “”Final”” I’ve got is Destination. Maybe pick up a thesaurus sometime, Hollywood?
In what seems to be turning into a staple of the January dumping grounds, after Contraband last year, it’s the Mark Wahlberg tough guy drama. My thought process going into this movie was kinda car crash like. I knew it wasn’t gonna be pretty, but I had to look anyways. There was just enough mystery in the trailer that I had to know how it’d all go down. And as an adopted Boston girl, I do love me some Mahky Mahk.
Broken City wasn’t as bad as I feared, but that still didn’t make it that good. Story wise, you’ve got this former cop turned PI who is hired by the NYC mayor to investigate his wife days before he’s up for reelection. Basically, you could break down all of the storylines into two pieces: personally motivated and politically motivated. I was into the more personal storylines, that dealt with the characters relationships, even if some of the minor subplots seemed superfluous. The details of things on the political side lost/didnt interest me. Not to mention the predictable “”twists””
Wahlberg was trying his damnest to carry this film, playing the conflicted guy with the shady past trying to redeem himself. Haven’t we seen him here before? He had some decent support from Barry Pepper and Jeffrey Wright, with Alona Tal brighting things up a bit. Alas, he didn’t have quite the same help from the other big names in the film. Catherine Zeta-Jones was phoning it in. She looked the part of big city mayor’s wife, but the only effort she put in was to fulfill the minimal requirements of the characterization. I guess she was trying to play her character as defeatedly aloof, but it just seemed like she didn’t wanna be there. Russell “”Best effort”” Crowe…sigh. First off, what was that accent? And that fake tan? That really distracted from anything else that he did, which wasn’t too great to begin with. No I dont take any satisfaction from ripping on him.
Eh, so I was in the game for more of it than I expected to be, but except for a few small moments from our supporting cast I called out, there really wasn’t much to Broken City.
Broken City – \m/ \m/