15, 117mins

James Gray whets the audience’s appetite for his latest film by serving up a fat slice of sex as an appetiser. It’s a skin-tingling opening for We Own the Night, featuring two of the more alluring actors in Hollywood: Eva Mendes and Joaquin Phoenix. The point of the scene, aside from old-fashioned titillation, is to highlight how much Phoenix’s character, the nightclub manager Bobby Green, stands to lose when the sheen starts to leave his gilded world.

The problem is that it’s not just Bobby and his fabulous girlfriend Amada (Mendes) who miss the glamorous twilight of the club scene. The audience also feels cheated: forced to trade the dissolute nightlife of New York in the 1980s for Bobby’s new life in beige motel rooms and witness protection, the least we could ask for is ratcheted tension in the story. But as Gray’s screenplay plods on there’s a sense of anticlimax, and a suspicion that this film threw everything it had at its opening act.

Bobby’s fall from power in the nightclub world is triggered when he finds himself on the other side of a drugs war to his father and brother (Robert Duvall and Mark Wahlberg). Both men are cops and look upon Bobby’s life as less manly and less respectable than their own. But every war has casualties, and when tragedy strikes, Bobby has to think hard about where his allegiances lie.

The always charismatic Phoenix is the highlight; he carries the film, rising above the occasionally uninspired dialogue and plotting to give a powerhouse turn as a man caught between ambition and duty.

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