Review: ‘Broken City’

Broken City

In the grand tradition of the political investigative thrillers of the 1970s, “Broken City” is a throwback to those movies about corrupt city officials making shady deals while some sap is hired to do some small task, only to have that sap get to peek behind and attempt to throw the whole thing out of whack. Cause you see, these saps never like being used as saps, and it pisses ’em off when it does. This goes beyond the 1970s, think of the pot-boiled detective novels of the 30s/40s, in which the down on their luck detective get hired to do some dirty work, only to discover the work was far dirtier than they were led to believe, causing them to have to dig deep to make sure things get sorted out correctly. That’s “Broken City.”

In “Broken City,” disgraced NYPD cop Billy Taggert (Mark Wahlberg, The Fighter, Ted) has a struggling private investigator business that gets life support when he is chosen by Mayor Hostetler (Russell Crowe, The Man With the Iron Fists) for a very typical PI-type of gig – spy on the Mayor’s wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones, The Phantom) and see who she is sleeping with, as the Mayor believes she is cheating on him. He pays an inordinate amount of money for the gig, Billy takes it without thinking, and so begins a story that goes deep into the final days of a heated mayoral election in NYC between Hostetler and his opponent, who is named, and I am not shitting you here, Jack Valliant (Barry Pepper, True Grit).

“Broken City” is okay overall, as it really doesn’t cover any new ground anywhere. Even the name Billy Taggert seems like a very prototypical movie-cop type of name. The question is, what are we supposed to be getting out of this movie? What does it actually have to say? That our governments, both large and small, are likely corrupt and though there are good people within these structures the whole system is doomed to fail? Because that’s nothing new. Been there, done that.

And sure Billy is a pretty morally corrupted character, who starts the movie by beating a murder indictment and has this hanging over his head for years afterward, but there is nothing new here about a character with a guilty conscience, nor how this particular character chooses to resolve this particular conflict. So while it is a mash up of tropes and conventions, and what isn’t these days, “Broken City” doesn’t do much to actually make these mashed up elements mean something new.

Not to say this is a bad movie; as a matter of fact it is good, I definitely wasn’t bored watching it and everyone puts in solid work. This is definitely a “catch it on HBO” or see it on DVD type of movie, I wouldn’t recommend you run out to the theater to go see it or anything, but if the opportunity arises to check it out, it is worth it.