In case it isn’t obvious **MAJOR SPOILERS** are ahead, so if you haven’t seen the film or plan on seeing it, you’re best to skip this post.
Just a brief history. “Brooklyn’s Finest” debuted at Sundance 2009, where it earned a lot of buzz (despite mixed reviews) for its gritty take on the standard police drama, and most notably its ruthlessly grim ending that earned “both hisses and applause.” After some upheaval, the film went from Senator to Millenium Films in the middle of last year and along the way, the original ending of the film was changed to how it appears currently in theaters.
In the film, Richard Gere, Ethan Hawke and Don Cheadle all play cops who are battling various demons while on the job. Gere’s character is a guy with a week left on the job before he retires, but who has long since lost his passion for police work. He’s so depressed that he wakes up in the morning, has a glass of scotch, puts an empty gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger (subtlety is definitely not a strong suit in this film). As ‘Finest’ moves into its second half, it becomes grimmer and grimmer, with director Antoine Fuqua eventually killing off both Hawke and Cheadle’s characters. The final sequence of the movie has Gere rescuing two girls from sexual predators, after which it freeze frames on his ravaged face as a final shot of redemption, fades to black and then the credits roll.
But that’s not what audiences at Sundance saw.
As MTV explains, at Sundance, the film keeps going past that scene and finds Gere now retired, on a lake in a boat. That’s when he pulls out his gun from earlier in the movie, and blows his brains out. End movie.
But the ever loquacious Fuqua gives a cornball explanation for his current freeze-frame ending: “When I got to the ending with Richard and you see his face, and the blood and his eyes swollen, I said ‘That’s America.’ That’s kind of where we are right now. Dazed, confused, but then we’re still moving forward, there’s still some hope, we still have a chance. We’ve taken some hits, but we’re still standing. It kind of came out of everything that was happening.”
So Gere’s face after saving two girls from sexual assault is the face of America? Oooh boy. We’re sure it had nothing to do with reports from Sundance that he faced considerable pressure to change the ending. Audiences generally like to see at least one character they’ve spent over two hours with actually live past the end of the film. Whether or not Fuqua or the studio decided to change the ending, dragging out the old chestnut of “this represents America” is as flimsy as you can get.
As you can tell, this writer liked “Brooklyn’s Finest” considerably less than his Playlist colleague, and found both endings to be a ludicrous, lazy and cheap way to try and get high drama out of a shocking twist. The audience we saw the film with literally groaned as both Hawke and Cheadle got offed in the final half. We’re pretty sure a riot would’ve broken out if the original ending had been kept intact.