Broken City - 1 smile

Too bad “Broken City,” starring Mark Wahlberg and Russell Crowe, is so awful. It has a solid cast, but the plot is overly complicated and the directing heavy-handed. Few, if any, of the characters are believable and the twists the story takes are telegraphed well beforehand. Wahlberg plays Billy Taggart, a boozy New York cop who takes the law into his own hands and gets away with murder. (There was a trial, or I think there was a trial, but he’s not convicted.) And he’s quietly booted off the force by Police Commissioner Fairbanks (Jeffrey Wright), but not before meeting slimy Mayor Hostetler (Crowe). You know the mayor is crooked instantly because of his aura of menace, awful haircut and fake tan. Seven years later, Billy has cleaned up his act and is working as a PI. His relationship with his actress girlfriend Natalie (Natalie Martinez) includes a subplot that goes nowhere. The mayor offers Taggart $50,000 to spy on his wife (a wasted Catherine Zeta-Jones) because he says she’s cheating on him. Along the way there’s predictable bantering between Taggart and his young assistant (Alona Tai), dull clashes between the mayor and his idealistic challenger, councilman Jack Valliant (Barry Pepper). Also key to the story are a real estate developer and top campaign contributor (Griffin Dunne) and Valliant’s campaign manager (Kyle Chandler).

The dialogue is often clichéd and director Allen Hughes includes too many unlikely scenarios and far-fetched coincidences for this movie to work. For instance, at the very moment Taggart arrives at a company he suspects of corruption, he sees workers throwing trash bags of evidence into a garbage bin. And what’s with Russell Crowe’s haircut? It’s distracting every time he’s on screen and although he makes for a good villain, you know that from the start so there’s no character development there. We’re meant to root for Taggart, but after he falls of the wagon and behaves like a fool, it’s hard to really care if he’s double-crossed and framed. Wahlberg was far more intense in The Fighter, but that movie had a better script than “Broken City.” 1/18/13