Antoine Fuqua’s Brooklyn’s Finest establishes itself as a moral tale from its first scene. Sal (Ethan Hawke) sits in a black, gangster-looking car outside the huge, sprawling St. Michael’s cemetery in Queens, NY with an unnamed hood. The man tells a wandering story about how he was acquitted by a judge for a drunk driving offence because he claimed he was running from two attackers who had tried to kill him. He was wrong for driving drunk, he explained, but he was also “right-er” because he was trying to save his own life. There’s wrong and wrong-er, right and right-er, he explains, and sometimes you can be right but wrong-er, wrong but right-er.

This prologue sets up the moral quagmire Brooklyn’s Finest sets out to unravel. The movie follows three police officers. Eddie (Richard Gere) is seven days away from retirement. Disgruntled and hardened by twenty-plus years on the job, Eddie has given-up on the idea that the cops are the good guys – the Brooklyn streets are merely the setting for various kinds of bad. Eddie flirts with suicide, and his only relationship is with a prostitute. Sal (Ethan Hawke) is a blue-color family man who leads a swat team that busts-up drug houses. At home, his wife is suffering from the black mold growing in the walls of their house, and without money to buy a new home, Sal is tempted to steal the piles of cash he finds during the raids. Tango (Don Cheadle) is an undercover agent who has deeply penetrated a powerful drug operation based out of a Brooklyn project, but he has immersed himself too deeply in the underworld and wants out.

The three are unknowingly swept up in the same storyline that culminates in a single night in the same project high-rise. Just retired, Eddie tries to rescue a missing person who has been forced into prostitution, Sal is off-duty, and he tries to rob a drug house. Tango is fed up with his police department handler’s, and he decides to have revenge on the street thugs that killed his underworld friend Caz (Wesley Snipes). The three are caught-up in wrong and wrong-er scenarios, deciding to operate alone, outside the jurisdiction of the police. They take justice – or at least their perception of it – into their own hands.

There is something cartoonish about the way the characters and drama play out in Brooklyn’s Finest. The drama is turned up to eleven, and with the exception of Eddie – very underplayed by Richard Gere, who is stoic and impenetrable, bordering on uninteresting – the ensemble is bombastic and in your face. It makes Brooklyn’s Finest fun to watch. Fuqua is able to grab our attention and leaves enough untold to keep you guessing as the story unfolds. But all three primary characters seem limited by they fidelity to playing out the drama of a single choice. They become types representing an idea.

Don Cheadle stands out against the others, and it is his storyline that pulls you deepest into the drama. Cheadle proves here that he is an elite performer. He takes a role that could have easily been tossed-off as another tough-talking street hood and brings a level of humanity to it. In Cheadle’s performance with find a three dimensionality in this world crime fighters and drug dealers. The actor, and not the screenplay, fleshes-out the back story. We read Tango’s hurt in Cheadle’s eyes; we see an endearing goodness in his soul. Yet Cheadle’s controlled and choreographed physicality is threatening and keeps you guessing: Who is Tango? Is he a thug or a cop? Is he a good guy or a bad guy? Or at the end of it all, is there any real difference between the two?