'We Own the Night,' Lost in Its Own Shadows

For people deeply into movies, Mark Wahlberg plus Joaquin Phoenix times James Gray equals one case of anticipatory goose bumps: The two simpatico actors starred in Gray's terrific 2000 drama, "The Yards," in which they executed one of the finest naturalistic fight scenes ever captured on screen.

While "We Own the Night" doesn't quite deliver on the promise of that earlier film, it has its moments, at least when Phoenix is in a scene. Gray has cast him and Wahlberg as brothers living in Brooklyn in the 1980s, on conflicting sides of escalating drug wars. Phoenix's Bobby is a high-living club manager with a hot, equally party-hearty girlfriend (Eva Mendes). Meanwhile, straight-arrow Joseph (Wahlberg) has gone "on the job," joining their dad (Robert Duvall) on the city police force. When a case Joseph is working on, involving the Russian mob, strikes closer to home for Bobby, years of estrangement between the men come to a head, in brutal encounters and shocking reversals.

Like Tony Gilroy (director of the much more accomplished "Michael Clayton"), Gray looks back to 1970s cinema for inspiration in "We Own the Night," which opens with grainy black-and-white photographs of drug busts and presumably real New York cops (the title is taken from the motto of the force's street crimes unit in the 1980s). With its washed-out palette of grays and blues, its Scorsese-esque scenes of domestic life in Brooklyn's Polish and Puerto Rican households and a bravura car chase that recapitulates the classic sequence from William Friedkin's "The French Connection," the film's cinematic antecedents are clear.

But too often, the story of filial competition and loyalty seems shoehorned into preconceived set pieces. Wahlberg and Phoenix don't have much screen time together, and when they do, Wahlberg is oddly inert. Coming off his incandescent turn in "The Departed," his muted, diffident mumble is especially disappointing in a movie where the same crackling wit and energy are sorely needed. For his part, Phoenix convincingly dispels thoughts of "What's Johnny Cash doing at the Limelight in 1988?," slipping easily into his role as a morally ambiguous lounge lizard and commanding the screen with transfixing power. He's at the center of the standout scenes Gray seems to have organized "We Own the Night" around, including that car chase (given added visual oomph by some impressive computer-generated rain), a tense interlude at an eerily quiet drug den and the film's payoff, set in a burning field of feathery grass.

This climactic sequence is completely gratuitous and improbable, one of many loopholes Gray chooses in favor of a visually arresting flourish. Meanwhile, human relationships, not to mention a crucial shift in one character's arc, are given maddeningly short shrift, as Mendes's character disappears perfunctorily and someone who's supposed to be under heavy police protection suddenly turns up in a particularly perilous old haunt. Both Bobby and Joseph are put through cringe-inducing physical punishments in a cop thriller that slathers on generous helpings of melodrama with its brutality.

The problem with "We Own the Night" is that it never seems to decide what it wants to be: a tough, atmospheric urban crime flick or a florid family soap. (When Ed Koch turns up in a cameo, it's difficult to discern if it's a gesture toward realism or camp.) The movie's chief pleasure, its stellar cast, is also the source of its most confounding frustrations, as the actors' performances never quite meld into the sharply focused ensemble the movie calls for. Maybe the best way to put it is that there's plenty of Night in "We Own the Night," just not enough We.

We Own the Night (117 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for strong violence, drug material, profanity, sexual content and brief nudity.