“BROKEN CITY” My rating: C (Opens wide on Jan. 18)
109 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Yawn.
Not even an A-list cast can do much with “Broken City,” this year’s indifferent released-in-January thriller from Mark Wahlberg.
Written by first-timer Brian Tucker and directed by Allen Hughes (half of the directing Hughes Brothers who gave us “From Hell” and the solid doc “American Pimp”), this overcomplicated mashup of film noir elements and Big Apple misdeeds never finds its voice or presents a story compelling enough to grab our interest.
Private eye Billy Taggart (Mark Wahlberg) used to be a cop — until he shot to death a homeboy who raped and murderd the sister of Billy’s girlfriend. Billy beat the rap but at the insistence of NYC’s garroulous Mayor Hostetler (Russell Crowe) and Police Commisioner Fairbanks (Jeffrey Wright) resigned from the force.
Now, years later, Billy specializes in chasing cheating husbands.
Still, he’s surprised when Hostetler offers him $50,000 to follow the Mayor’s wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and prove she’s having an affair. Billy finds that New York’s First Lady is indeed hanging around with another man (Kyle Chandler, late of “Friday Night Lights”). Not just any man, but the campaign director of a city councilman who hopes to unseat Mayor Hostetler in a fiercely contested election.
Needless to say, mayhem ensues, corruption is revealed and nothing is what it first seems to be.
Why we should care is anybody’s guess. Wahlberg plays Billy with a largely deadpan expression, and the fact that he really was guilty of murder doesn’t exactly endear him to us.
Crowe sports a bad haircut and a jowly sinister demeanor as the crooked-as-a- corkscrew mayor. Zeta-Jones is wasted in a nothing role. Even Wright, a brilliant actor, can do little with his inscrutable police commissioner.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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