- guardian.co.uk,
- Friday May 02 2008 10:17 BST
The latest from James Gray, a writer-director who knows his genre, his milieu and his preferred rep company.
This is a rather less dour take on family, corruption and the conflicts of life on both sides of the law in New York's outer regions than his The Yards, which also starred Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix. Then they were best friends, this time - rather less credibly - they're brothers, one (Wahlberg) inside the law, the other (Phoenix) not quite outside it, but running a club owned by Russian drug-dealers.
The plot kicks off when their dad, Robert Duvall, tells Phoenix: "Sooner or later, you're gonna be with us, or you're gonna be with the drug dealers." He's a police chief in the narcotics division, and if that dialogue is a bit too schematic to be real-life dialogue, the set-up, too is very old Hollywood, a reliable standby from East of Eden to The Departed.
But Gray is good at atmosphere, particularly of the gloomy kind; Phoenix is charismatic and Eva Mendes, as his girlfriend is, as usual, a major plus, with warmth and believability as well as salsa sizzle.
But these Brighton Beach Russian villains wouldn't last long against the London version, if Cronenberg's Eastern Promises is to be believed. Co-produced by Phoenix and Wahlberg, it's all very earnest.
