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83At its core, it's an exploration of the demands and obligations of brotherly love, staged with honesty, originality and a surprising spark of intelligence.
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83It's awfully difficult at this point in film history to come up with a car chase that's startlingly new, but Gray pulls it off. It's the best of its kind since "The French Connection."
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The closest thing Gray's done to a commercial actioner, the film also applies his genius for tone (aided by superlative sound work) to set pieces that throb with trauma: a tinnitus-soundtracked shoot-out and a rain-slick car chase set to the tempo of windshield wipers.
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75We Own the Night is defiantly, refreshingly unhip.
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75This is an atmospheric, intense film, well acted, and when it's working it has a real urgency.
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75The movie really belongs to Phoenix, who gives a haunting performance with just the right degree of intensity.
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75The movie's climactic car chase is as absurdly thrilling as it is innovative. Set almost silently in a blue-gray daytime downpour, it has a tough, improvisatory danger that makes the movie. If John Coltrane went in for action sequences, he'd have dug this one.
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75With a cast like this, one has a right to expect something amazing, so the fact that We Own the Night is merely "entertaining" might cause disappointment in some quarters.
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75Whatever the case, We Own The Night plays like a masterpiece because it skillfully appropriates actual masterpieces, not because it earns the label on its own merits.
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70An intriguing blend of mainstream audience-pleaser and a more subtle, even intellectual agenda.
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70Gray knows how to sell the idea of unalterable destiny with a car chase: That's the mark of a real action director.
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70Adequately acted and flecked with the required quota of action to satisfy genre fans, pic recalls numerous good police dramas of the 1970s, but mostly in superficial ways that bring nothing new to the table.
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70Phoenix is an arresting presence on screen, but don't expect any "Departed"-esque fast talk from Wahlberg, who is oddly inert in a role that should crackle with brotherly ambivalence.
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67The story is too patterned and too contrived.
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63When it goes wrong, specifically when Bobby is given a badge like an angry Earp brother in "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral," the story turns into something barely at the level of a TV cop show.
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63At times solid and suspenseful, at times dopily implausible and woefully familiar.
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63Phoenix gives a nice performance as a man caught between loyalties but blind to the realities all around him, but Gray's screenplay is filled with clunky, Dr. Phil-sounding aphorisms that stop the movie cold.
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63We Own the Night can't sustain itself; as the stakes of the story get higher, Gray paints it in broader and broader strokes until there's almost nothing you can believe in it anymore.
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63Creaky in its plotting, occasionally electrifying in its direction, We Own the Night is even more of a throwback to old-fashioned crime dramas than Martin Scorsese's "The Departed."
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60A more accomplished film than "Yards." Yet it will fail to satisfy police movie buffs, as procedures are de-emphasized, and the drama is too perfunctory and obvious.
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60It's a bare-knuckled crime drama set in 1988 that stylistically could have been made that year and emphasizes Gray's strengths as a director while drawing attention to his limitations as a writer.
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58This is a perfectly serviceable thriller. It's just not the New York family crime saga it clearly wants to be.
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50Gray's writing lacks the punch and zing that might take your mind off such rickety plotting.
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50Ultimately done in not just by its familiarity -- anyone who can't figure out where the story is heading hasn't watched enough Scorsese -- but also by the convenient coincidences and contrivances Gray relies on in order to pump the story into something greater than it needs to be.
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50Too slow to be a guilty pleasure and too dumb to be an innocent one.
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50Things are a little off. The style is gritty 1970s-style crime thriller, but the morals are straight out of 2007, and the movie is set in 1988.
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50Yet the whole thing is so generic, so been-there-before, that I spent most of it asking myself nitpicking questions. To wit:
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50The problem with We Own the Night is that it mistakes sentiment for profundity, and takes its ideas about character and fate more seriously than it takes its characters and their particular fates. "I feel light as a feather," Bobby says in a crucial scene, at which point the movie starts to sink like a stone.
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50Gray would have been happiest, I guess, to make movies in the nineteen-seventies, and this one feels much closer to 1975 than to 1988; he could certainly use a seventies audience to watch his movies now--one that could be trusted not to grumble about his slow, unexcitable fades.
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50The story takes place in 1988 in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Coney Island, but I could never figure out why; with its pitiless gangsters and virtuous boys in blue, it could have been set anywhere.
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42The plotting is so rickety that the action hinges on suspicions roused by a character carrying a cigarette lighter and matches. Is that more rare or suspect than a man wearing a belt and suspenders?
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40Falls into the category of the contrived and forgettable cop drama.
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40Gray's signature long takes and overhead shots are in evidence and add to the film's fatalistic tone, and one rainy car-chase sequence is a real keeper. But, overall, it's impossible to shake the film's gloomy sense of eternal repetition.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 13 out of 23
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Mixed: 3 out of 23
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Negative: 7 out of 23
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