Private Eyes, by Sarah Brinks

The biggest crime in Broken City is not political maleficence but of
wasting its potential. With a cast full of talented actors and a
vaguely intriguing political thriller at its heart,  Broken City is
never smart or challenging. It is frustrating when you can see the
skeleton of a good film below the surface but instead you are stuck
watching this mediocre film play out on screen.

Broken City is supposed to be a political thriller so the plot has a
lot of twists and turns and red herrings. The basic plot is Mark
Wahlberg plays Billy Taggart a private eye who seven years ago had to
leave the police force after killing a man. The then-mayor (Russell
Crowe) tells him he is a hero in his eyes even though Billy has to
leave the force. Seven years later the mayor is up for reelection and
he hires Billy to investigate his wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and find
out if she is having an affair. Billy’s private eye business is deep
in debt so when the mayor offers him $50,000 for the job and Billy
takes it. Naturally this leads to a lot of political maneuvers and set
ups which leave Billy wishing he had never gotten involved.
A big problem with the film is that the Billy character isn’t very
smart. Often with these types of political thrillers the main
character is a nice-guy-average-Joe who finds himself in a situation
he shouldn’t be in but in the end is smart enough to pull off a clever
play that gets him out of trouble and gets the bad guy to show his
hand and get caught. The problem with Billy is he is always three
steps behind. I won’t spoil the ending but even at the end he is still
running to catch up and ultimately stumbles.

This is writer Brian Tucker’s first and only film, and boy does it
show. It is like watching a first draft projected on screen. I think
Tucker took a hand full of genres stuck them in a  blender and came up
with Broken City. It is 70% political thriller, 10% revenge film, 10%
cop drama, 5% broken love story, and 5% Mark Wahlberg looking at
himself in reflective surfaces. The dialogue in this film is lazy and
boring. There are lines in this film that the most talented actor on
the planet could not make sound authentic or believable. If you are
unfortunate enough to see this film I give you the embarrassingly bad
scene at the elevator between Crowe and Zeta- Jones as example A.

The best example is of wasted potential is Crowe’s character Mayor
Hostetler, Crowe is a good actor. He doesn’t always pick the best
projects or get cast in the right roles but he is a talented man who
is very capable on screen (see his performance in a far superior
political thriller, The Insider). Hostetler is the bad guy, we know it
from the first moment we see him on screen, but he is written
throughout the film as either five degrees too nice to be a slimy
politician, or five degrees too obvious to be a  believable
politician. Crowe using a convincing New York accent, a crazy orange
spray tan, and a JFK haircut does his best to make his character not
just a caricature, but ultimately he fails. If he had been written
better and if Crowe has been allowed to really crank up the sleaze, it
could have been a much-improved film. Wahlberg and Zeta-Jones are also
wasted in this film, the script simply gives them nothing to latch on
to so they are one-dimensional characters in a one-dimensional story.

The film doesn’t seem to know when it has a good thing going for it.
This is evidenced by the wasting of some its best performances and
just relying on the actors with star power to turn the mediocre story
telling and dialogue into gold. Billy’s assistant Katy played by Alona
Tal is probably one of the best performances and characters in the
film. Katy is young and naive but also eager so she is able to deliver
the adolescent dialogue believably. She is also a character who never
feels forced and has a complete arch. Also Kyle Chandler as Paul
Andrews is a brief but welcome character who is actually believable
and interesting. He is one of the few characters in the film who feels
like he is smart enough to play in the political arena and not come
off as a fool.

I will give director Allen Hughes some credit; it is a slick looking
and well shot film. He is able to use moving images to tell a story,
so he did his job. However, no matter how he dressed up the terrible
script, it was still a terrible script and in the end a disappointing
movie. One character in the film describes a political party as an
Italian Opera. I think he is right but instead of Broken City being
Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata you get Beyonce’s Carmen: A Hip Hopera.