I expected Broken City to be about a corrupt mayor using a former cop to catch his wife in an affair with the whole thing turning into some couple's vengeance flick. Clearly, I missed something, because the film is actually about a former cop who gets caught in the crossfires of some political manuevering during election season as the incumbent mayor's foes attempt to prove his corruption and bring him down.
While Broken City has some potential, the amount of foreshadowing in the film is insulting. The pacing is inconsistent, and some scenes, such as the mayoral debate, drag on for entirely too long, which made the entire film is exhausting. The motivations of various characters are extremely questionable, and what seems like a kind mission to denounce a corrupt mayor turns into a grudge match with different characters revealing their personal machinations with an ever greater amount of corruption present. As a whole, Broken City could have definitely benefitted from some editing to prevent it from seeming like an extended episode of Law & Order or some other cliché police procedural.
Crowe (the mayor) and Wahlberg (the cop) both play fairly believeable representations of their characters, if you can get beyond some strange haircuts and bizarre accents. Wahlberg's character, Taggert, is the only one in the film to undergo any sort of intensive development; everyone else is regretfully two dimensional. From the trailer, I expected Catherine Zeta-Jones, as the mayor's wife, to play a much greater role than she did in the film, but she is instead relegated to being more of a secondary character. This move likely better served the plot, but as a result, the film is definitely heavy on the male prescense of Wahlberg, Crowe, and various other supporting characters.
On the surface, Broken City isn't a completely terrible film if you can see beyond the gimme plot. At worst, you can mock the film to your heart's content because there are plenty of those moments to be had.
