Broken City (2013) Movie Review

Broken City plunges us headlong into the zoo of modern New York City, where we find disgraced ex-cop Billy Taggart (Mark Wahlberg) working as a paparazzi-style private eye, taking beatings and earning ire, while being stiffed on payment by deadbeat customers. Billy gets a chance to return to the big leagues when his old acquaintance, Mayor Hostetler (Russell Crowe), calls him in for a favor: follow Cathleen Hostetler (Catherine Zeta-Jones), the mayor’s wife, to find out who she is having an affair with. Watch Broken City Online Free

Billy thinks the gig is easy money, but when his investigation is implicated as part of a high-profile murder, Taggart gets wise to a chess game of power involving politics, corruption and urban plight, in which he is just a pawn.

With Broken City, director Allen Hughes (Book of Eli) and newcomer screenwriter Brian Tucker had pretty lofty ambitions – but unfortunately, those ambitions are thwarted by a film that falls flat on its face in terms of both directorial and narrative execution. It’s a shame, because there is more thought and intelligence woven into this crime drama tale – only that wisdom is somehow lost in translation to the screen.

Download Broken City Movie. While marketed as a standard hard-boiled crime thriller, the movie is in fact an attempt at more subtle and layered commentary on many areas of city life. The title of the film is the biggest clue into what Hughes and Tucker are going for: “Broken City” is a general reference to the hypocrisies and injustices of “the system” that governs every level of urban America – as well as serving as a reference to the “broken” people who exist within that system. It could’ve been a scathing and effective commentary on very real issues (much like Se7en used crime-thriller conventions in its sly commentary on the squalid state of urban America in the ’90s); but instead, what we get is a somewhat scatter-brained narrative, populated with characters who are so compromised or unsympathetic (in one way or another) that it’s hard to root for or relate to any of them.

Watch Broken City Online. Both Wahlberg and Crowe turn in good performances (Crowe especially hams it up with his pseudo-New Yorker accent and braggadocio) – but again, those performances are only bringing to life misconceived characters in a flawed narrative, so it’s hard to applaud them all that much. Billy should be our protagonist, but with his on-and-off again alcoholism, indiscriminate brutality, questionable morals (and implied homophobia), it’s hard to know how to take the character, all things considered. Somewhat less murky is Crowe’s status as the villain in the piece – but given the surrounding characters, even a clear-cut bad guy seems less bad (comparatively speaking) by the time the end credits roll.