We Own the Night **1/2

Taking its title from the '80s-era slogan of the New York Police Department's street crimes unit, We Own the Night stars Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg as brothers on opposite sides of the law.

Joe Grusinsky (Wahlberg) is a dedicated, decorated second-generation cop. Bobby (Phoenix) is the proverbial black sheep, a coke-snorting disco-club manager with a different last name - Green - a party-girl girlfriend (Eva Mendes), and business associates who may or may not be tied to the Russian mob.

One thing the brothers do share: a hero father, Burt Grusinsky, a deputy police chief played exactly how you figure he'd be played if he were being played by Robert Duvall - which he is.

At times solid and suspenseful, at times dopily implausible and woefully familiar, We Own the Night owes a bunch to the bare-knuckled New York crime dramas of Sidney Lumet - though it doesn't come close to Lumet's latest, opening next month (and also about two brothers and a father), Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

We Own the Night is the stylish, efficient, if derivative, work of writer/director James Gray, whose previous forays - Little Odessa, The Yards - were likewise New York stories with Russian crime-world motifs. The film, set in the big-car, big-hair 1980s, gives Phoenix and Wahlberg the chance to try out their New Yawk accents and strut some serious actor stuff, but there's not much depth to these characters, unless you count the depth accrued by decades' worth of similar movies, similar roles.

Still, if you buy the premise that no one outside of his immediate family knows that Bobby Green is connected to the Grusinsky cops clan, We Own the Night does deliver jolts of pulse-quickening drama. With Joe seriously injured on an NYPD bust, Bobby agrees to go undercover to rat out the drug-dealing scum responsible for his sibling's shooting. Sweat beads collect on Phoenix's forehead as he walks into the lair, a wire neatly hidden in his cigarette lighter.

But why, wonders the suspicious Russian thug, is Bobby carrying a lighter and a book of matches? What's up with that?

Gray manages to give Mendes more to work with than the usual gangster's-moll material - her Amada may be out for a good time, but the actress' character comes across as genuine, and genuinely afraid for the guy she loves. And the director orchestrates a terrific car-chase sequence, a virtuoso piece of movie action set in a torrential daytime downpour that brings visibility to zero, and brings cars careening into one another as bullets pop, bumpers thud and bad things happen to folks we're meant to care about.

Directed by James Gray. With Robert Duvall, Eva Mendes, Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg. Distributed by Columbia Pictures.

Running time: 1 hour, 57 mins.

Parent's guide: R (violence, sex, nudity, profanity, drugs, adult themes)

Playing at: Area theaters

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