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It’d be easy to write off this misty-eyed mélange of midlife
nostalgia and movie-movie show-offery as bush-league Scorsese, but the
aggressively derivative Brooklyn Rules is a fascinating
artifact of how absorbed into the mainstream Marty’s idiom has become.
No wonder his last few flicks have been disappointments: He didn’t
stray from the path; three generations of film-school punks ran him off
it.
Punks, albeit the cuddly variety, are what Brooklyn Rules
predictably revolves around. Three Bay Ridge mooks circa 1985 wrestle
with stock Hollywood dilemmas: Straight arrow Michael (frog-faced
Prinze) is torn between the ’hood and a Columbia poli-sci hottie
(Suvari); knuckle-dragging Carmine (Caan) flirts with a job as muscle
for a local mob boss (Baldwin—is there no film this guy won’t do?); and
cinephiliac Bobby (Entourage’s Ferrara) cracks wise as the chubby, lovable and inevitably doomed sidekick.
Screenwriter and Sopranos alum Terence Winter tosses as
many genres into this autobiographical mix as possible, from college
romance to revenge thriller and male weepie, but links them with
nothing more substantial than canned sentimentality. So despite the
HBO-worthy prodigiousness of fuck in its dialogue, Brooklyn Rules comes off as what Mean Streets might’ve been with Disney funding.