Broken City (2013)

A cops kill a guy on the street in NY. Surprisingly he's brought to trial. Unsurprisingly the charges are dropped. But that moment the chief of police informs the mayor that they've found an eye witness. The cop is let go from the force and becomes a private detective.One day he gets a call from the mayor. He wants him to trail his wife because he thinks she's cheating on him. On top of that, it's election season and a recent billion dollar land deal has the mayor on the defensive against the moral leftist candidate.Taggart, the detective, follows the mayor's wife and discovers she's seeing the campaign manager of her husband's opponent no less. We learn more about Taggart. He's married to a lovely actress. Of course he used to be an alcoholic (are there any non-alcoholic cops in NY according to Hollywood?) but for her sake has recovered. He doesn't fit into her group of indie artists. On the day of the premiere of her indie flick, he starts drinking again after seeing the rough sex scene she performed. Turns out her sister was killed in her neighborhood, that Taggart used to patrol. In fact, the dead guy from the intro was the sister's killer who avoided jail due to a technicality. Convenient coincidences.In the meantime there are some surprises about the relationship between the wife and the campaign manager and about the land deal. Taggart gets paid by the mayor and could have let the whole thing go. But when the campaign manager ends up shot dead and Taggart could be implicated, he decides that he's going to take the mayor down. While the mayor and the whole land deal appear dirty, the still does well in the final debate. There just is no smoking guy. Taggart will attempt to procure the smoking gun but the mayor has some cards up his sleeve as well.The script of Broken City had a lot of potential, which the producers (Wahlberg among them) recognized and threw a lot of money at the production by hiring a strong cast. Unfortunately, what was needed was another writer to polish the script. There are some excesses in the form of downright absurd lines. Direction is alright, except when the camera apes those dumb hospital shows and starts rotating in circles.What both the writer and director failed to do though is focus on the story. Instead they focused on the Wahlberg character and his assistant for some reason. What should be a thrilling investigation and discovery of corruption (as the misleading title would indicate) and of a corrupt man is rather a letdown. In fact this story doesn't even bother in presenting the villain as much of a villain, certainly nothing that would raise eyebrows in NY and even less after the Supreme Court's eminent domain decision.

Story 7.5 / 10 Acting 1 / 10 Cinematography 2/10: 0/10 on filming the actors and 2/10 on spending some $ on effects/stunts.The movie tells an interesting story but the actors, all of them, are pretty dull; except Alona Tal she was the only one happy playing her character.Catherine Zeta Jones' script can be counted by the number of letters rather than the number of words.The movie could have been done better using actors who wanted to act.What makes the movie worse is its extended length: it is hard to watch people who do not want to be on the set being forced to do so for such an extended period.

BROKEN CITY is the sort of film which thinks that if you throw in a racial epithet or two and have the characters all act like sleazeballs then that makes you mature. The plot sees Marky Mark's ex-cop cum PI take on a case for the shady Mayor of NYC, who suspects his ice- queen wife of infidelity. Inevitably this is a cover for dodgy goings on involving the upcoming elections (the other candidate is a gay liberal, so it isn't hard to guess who's the villain) and a real-estate deal (involving a mogul with one Jewish and one Irish name, to make sure nobody gets offended). The plot hinges on the firm involved not only failing to shred vital documents but actually leaving a whole box of them in the trash, ready for our hero to grab. There's a romantic subplot which sees the hero dump his gal - the gorgeously husky- voiced Natalie Martinez - and get drunk for no reason except that the plot demands it. In fairness to it, it's a rare American thriller which relies on politics and has no real action scenes - a few desultory gunshots aside - to speak of, so it's just a pity that it's still so politically juvenile.

You wouldn't miss a thing, if you miss this movie. Even Mark Wahlberg and Russell Crowe don't help. Yeah, good actors are in the cast, so what!? Story line doesn't go beyond being a mediocre, another corruption story with some action here and there...Sometimes I even lost track of what's going on, because it wasn't written well, I guess.Nothing new to offer... Nothing interesting... No exceptional acting...I don't even have anything else to say really to finish up this review... I wish IMDb didn't have this rule to finish up a review for certain numbers of lines. When it's a waste of time to watch the movie, it's even harder to write a review about it.