Despite tight performances by Russell Crowe, Mark Wahlberg and Jeffrey Wright, Broken City exudes the unsettling feeling that director Allen Hughes about midway through the film let the screenplay get into the hands of a pack of schoolchildren. Cheapshot plot contrivances race to outdo each other while facilitating movement toward equally plentiful cliches. It all becomes so numbing after awhile that I strabgely came to sort of enjoy pro actors demonstrating they can rise above just about anything and still deliver the goods, damaged or otherwise. Feeling violated in terms of a script insulting one’s intelligence is nothing new but at least here Crowe as a powerful New York City mayor and Wahlberg as a private detective with a lurid-cop background, leave the viewer with a modicum of self-respect. And Wright as a mysterious police commisioner shows a command that further buffers the absurdities.
What we have here begins with a conspicuous plot device about Wahlberg’s past that even the most innocent viewer will realize is sure to appear again at the film’s climax. It ends with a headscratching decision by Wahlberg to go after The Mayor, who’s probably betrayed him, with a (metaphorically-speaking) nuclear bomb when a far less messy sledgehammer would have sufficed. In between characters like Wahlberg’s girlfriend (Natalie Martinez) and her family suddenly disappear and appear in the film for no apparent reason other than Hughes-and-company need to get from Point A to point B with as little outside-the-box thinking as possible. We are led to believe, for instance, that Wahlberg is willing to go to the ends of the earth to save a fictitious Brooklyn povery-stricken neighborhood from Crowe’s exploitation largely due to his girlfriend’s parents presence in the neighborhood . Yet when he drops in on them alone after Natalie breaks up with him, they haven’t seen him in years. Natalie, in keeping with the film’s haphazard tone, becomes a dangling character.
It’s the kind of film where occasional great one-liners by Wright and Cathrine Zeta-Jones (as a steely Mayor’s wife) do their best to outweigh a screenplay mired in laziness. Even an election campaign subplot featuring the reliable Barry Pepper as Crowe’s rival, comes up a bit short when Pepper’s usual ability to credibly play Over the Top gets stretched into wobbliness here. Finally, I left the theater briefly tempted to excuse Wahlberg’s decision in the film’s climax as an Achilles heel of some sort. Yet when the best that can be said is, “Well he had to go there or there’s no movie here,” that leaves little room for rationalizing. Sometimes the best excuses flail away before they can be taken seriously.
