We Own the Night on Blu-ray

[Wayde]

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Eva Mendes, Mark Wahlberg, Robert Duvall, Alex Veadov
Director: James Gray
Studio: Sony Pictures
Production Year: 2007
Media Year: February 12, 2008
Rating: R
Length: 117 minutes

Movie

Coming so soon after better, similar movies is possibly the worst charge you could make of We Own the Night. It’s a good, not great movie that has garnered very little attention. It’s a crime drama that deals with a family divided by New York City’s criminal underworld. One of the brothers, Capt. Joe Grusinsky is a high ranking cop (Mark Wahlberg) while the other, Bobby Green (with a fake name played by Joaquin Phoenix) is the manager of a trendy night club owned by a Russian mobster. The club will invariably become the focal point of the local drug trade and tension over Green’s lifestyle within his family.

It’s a classic struggle that will remind you of a lot of other movies. The Russian gangsters might remind you of Eastern Promises, where Russian Gangsters are done better. The moral struggle of a family divided by the law will remind you of The Departed, which is a better movie.

We Own the Night takes place in 1988. As I watched it was easy to forget it took place in a different time period despite the great pains director James Gray took keeping all the sets as authentic as possible. I can’t decide if that’s a good thing.

One of the strong points in the film is Gray’s use of perspective in the David Fincher style. A memorable scene at the begging follows Phoenix starting at a couch upstairs in a backroom over the club. We can hear muffled pounding of Blondie’s Heart of Glass through the floorboards. Then Phoenix walks out of the room and toward a balcony. The scene visually and audibly blooms as we’re taken over the balcony onto the colorful, distinctively 80’s throng below. The scene only lasts several seconds but is a highlight of the film’s Dolby TrueHD mix.

The cast is top notch. It stars Wahlberg, Phoenix and Robert Duvall as the family’s patriarch, Deputy Chief Bert Grusinsky. Eva Mendez plays Bobby Green’s girlfriend, Amanda Juarez in a surprisingly complex role.

But the movie isn’t without problems. New York City is big, but possibly not so big that a gangster club owner wouldn’t know his manager’s father is the Deputy Chief of Police. Although it won’t stack up to some of the better movies it aspires to, We Own the Night is entertaining, especially if you’re a fan of the crime drama.

Video

1080P AVC Mpeg-4, 1.85 aspect ratio.

It’s a very clean transfer to HD. I turned the sharpness down a bit for this one as high edge

enhancements won’t do the video any justice. Although the dark shadows in many dialogue driven scenes look excellent, you may notice some grain when the darkness comes in. The movie makes liberal use of visual cues like changes in color temperature, especially to cold, which emphasize certain scenes and this works very well.

But despite all my warnings about dark shadows and cold color, the movie has its bright and colorful scenes. These are especially present in the night club where the 80s fashions might take you back - that is if you remember the era.

Audio

English, French and Spanish Dolby TrueHD 5.1.

Yes, that’s three Dolby TrueHD soundtracks, but no legacy Dolby Digital or PCM. For a dialogue driven movie it sounds very good. There are limited scenes for the audio to really kick in and play with your multi-channel system. The scene I mentioned near the start of the movie is one glorious exception. There are high caliber gunshots that will use your LFE channel and it sounds very real, but they’re few and far between.

Special Features:

Special features are few and forgettable. They mostly involve director James Grey talking. I found them all tedious and didn’t listen to the director’s commentary which has more of Grey talking and only Grey, no other cast or crew to bounce conversation around. All the featurettes on the Blu-ray disc also appear on the DVD but for Blu-ray they’re all in 1080P high-def.

Audio Commentary: Describes in detail many technical aspects of each scene. I didn’t listen to the whole thing but I don’t think there were any surprises here.

Police Action: Creating Cops, Cars and Chaos: (10 minutes). Covers some of the stunts and driving. There is a very good scene in the film involving a rainy day car chase. In the feature Grey comments that he doesn’t think it’s been done before.

Tension: Creating We Own the Night: 15 minutes. Interviews with stars and Mr. Gray.
A moment in Crime: Creating Late 80s Brooklyn: 9 minutes. Lots of info about sets and costumes and the pains they took to capture the 80s look.

Overall

It’s not a movie I’ll recommend you rush out and buy in any format. There is nothing on the Blu-ray disc except the movie that is worth viewing and the movie itself will appeal to fans of the genre.

We Own the Night is a movie you should probably just rent for one night.

[Sonnie]

Watched it the other night and agree it is worth only a rental... if that. I was not all that impressed, but I do like Mark Wahlberg and Robert Duvall... and they did maintain the movie for me.