Now Showing: Broken City ***

Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Russell Crowe.
Director: Allen Hughes
Rated: R
Showing: Liberty Theatre. Fri-Sat 2.30pm, 6pm, 9pm; Sun 2.30pm, 5.30pm; Mon-Thurs 2.30pm, 6pm.
Runtime: 109 minutes
Crime, drama, thriller

Sometimes the trailer is the best thing about a movie. Other times it doesn’t do the film justice, making it seem far more routine than it really is.

Such is the case with Broken City which looks like just another urban thriller with Mark Wahlberg flexing his usual “you-talkin’-to-me?” East Coast attitude. The reality is that, while Broken City is hardly revolutionary, it’s a slyly entertaining cop saga that leans more heavily on acting and dialogue than gunplay and chases. Wahlberg is Billy Taggart, a New York City detective who left the force under a cloud seven years ago after a high-profile shooting. Now, he’s a low-rent private eye who has been reduced to taking incriminating photos of wayward spouses. To add financial insult to career injury, he then has to hound his loutish clients to get paid.

So when the pugnacious mayor (Russell Crowe) summons Billy to his office, says he thinks the city’s first lady (Catherine Zeta-Jones) has been playing around, and offers him $50,000 to come up with the goods, he’s is more than happy to take the job. But the payday soon turns into a nightmare as Billy realizes that what seemed like a simple love triangle is really a complex web of political corruption and civic chicanery.

Certainly, Broken City is no Chinatown, with which it shares some storyline similarities. But it also doesn’t devolve into predictable action, which gives it a leg up on its competition.