Šš BROKEN CITY. Director: Allen Hughes. Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Russell Crowe, Catherine Zeta-jones. Showing at: Nu Metro Walmer Park, the Boardwalk; Ster Kinekor the Bridge
HACKED out by one of the twin Hughes brothers who directed the Jack the Ripper potboiler From Hell, Allen Hughes’s Broken City is another feverish, thickly plotted, overwritten and ultimately preposterous tale of sordid New York political corruption in which nothing much rings true.
Manhattan is played by New Orleans, for starters.
The crooked mayor is played by the mumbling Russell Crowe, a combination crime lord and urban hatchetman who runs every vice in town, owns City Hall and bribes everyone onto his personal payroll, from Harlem landlords to the NYPD, yet speaks in such a whisper that his voice is drowned out by the ice melting in a highball glass. What were they thinking?
Under the circumstances, Mark Wahlberg soars as Billy Taggart, a cop who is framed by the mayor for the fatal shooting of a teenage punk and drummed off the force.
Seven years later, the incumbent mayor, still mumbling and in the middle of a controversial election, offers Billy, now working as a private eye, $50 000 to track down, photograph and reveal the identity of a man he suspects of sleeping with his luscious wife Cathleen (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Billy quickly sniffs out her lover as Paul Andrews (Kyle Chandler), who happens to be the campaign manager for the mayor’s rival – a rich, liberal and inexplicably honest city councilman absurdly named Jack Valliant (Barry Pepper).
Before Billy can collect his fee, Andrews is murdered and Billy is up to his preppy haircut in intrigues that lead all the way to the police commissioner (Jeffrey Wright).
What follows are a series of subplots with more holes than a Brooklyn street after a January snowstorm. Now in revenge mode, it’s up to the private dick to set things straight, smashing up the city traffic in the process.
The action sequences are of the present, but everything seems to be taking place in some long-ago era.
Ultimately, everyone in the movie is wasted, including Zeta-Jones, who provides great eye candy but has nothing important to say or do.
Most of the roles are so ambiguous you end up scratching your head in the final reel, and some of the loose ends are so irrelevant they seem to have ended up on the cutting-room floor.
With Russell Crowe, it really helps if you can read lips.