Last night I watched James Gray’s 2007 crime film We Own the Night, where in 1988 Brooklyn, Joaquin Phoenix plays a club owner named Bobby who turns a blind eye to drug dealing going on in his club, getting wrapped up in casual drug use, until his cop family (Robert DuVall and Mark Wahlberg) are working vice and street crimes and targeting the drug crime ring operating at the club. Then Bobby is torn between his fractured relationships with his cop father and brother, and being complicit with cocaine trafficking coming into his club and inviting more violence in.
It’s a pretty good movie, engaging to watch, and while Mark Wahlberg feels like he can play a cop in his sleep, Joaquin Phoenix is good in this as a guy wanting to live the party life with no consequences, and ends up feeling sick and awful when his complacency does come back to bite him.
I forgot how famous Eva Mendes was in the 2000s, since she’s long retired from acting (save for a 2021 voice cameo on Bluey), and she really had this 1960s glamour look that worked so well for her. She plays Amara, the partying girlfriend of Bobby, but this scene shows her dealing with violence hitting too close to home, getting too real for her, and trying to convince her boyfriend not to take more risks. It’s a really good scene between her and Phoenix.
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