Broken City

Mark Wahlberg plays a private investigator caught in a high-stakes political game in Broken City, one of many New York crime dramas that gets neither New York nor being a crime drama close to correct. It’s a film with a lot of jagged parts—a corrupt mayor (Russell Crowe) who seems like the kind of City Hall power broker even the 1980s got tired of; a cloudy mystery that may or may not just be about an extramarital affair; a silly girlfriend subplot that apparently exists only so Wahlberg’s private eye can fall off the wagon at a critical moment; and even the private eye himself, another staple of a bygone movie era. But all of these things are supposed to seem contemporary, which only makes it worse. Set it in the 1980s and Broken City could have at least risen to mediocrity.