Although “We Own the Night” is set in a stark, drab New York City of 1988, it is unmistakably a product of our current social climate—a loud glorification of government-backed violence and a raucous endorsement of a “do whatever it takes” mentality.

In the film’s world, cops are still called pigs, cocaine rules the street, Blondie still plays at clubs, and mobsters with ponytails wear tight leather jackets. But such 80s cultural stereotypes seem anachronistic, mostly because they so poorly mask the fact that the questions at the film’s core are distinctly those of our time—a time when our country’s de facto cultural voice is some mongrel mishmash of Fox News and CNN.

If only writer-director James Gray were more sensitive to these issues, then his film might seem less a propaganda co-written by the NYPD’s PR branch and the Department of Homeland Security, and more like the excellent crime thriller it might have been (and sort of is).

Thankfully, Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg bolster Gray’s average direction and his amateurish screenplay. Phoenix’s character, Bobby, runs a Brooklyn nightclub under the auspices of a shifty Russian family, while Wahlberg’s character, Bobby’s brother Joseph, serves as a decorated police officer and lives in the shadow of his father, the chief of police. When the Russian mob tries to use Bobby’s connections to move their cocaine into the city and cripple the police leadership at the same time, the family’s dirty laundry airs, and things get messy.

Unfortunately, Gray’s writing is just as messy. Nonetheless, though the man may not understand how to shape a dramatic scene, he aces his action sequences. The undercover infiltration of a drug warehouse is tense and stifling, with each corridor distending into murky darkness, shot with just enough slow-motion to give the whole scene the feeling of a nauseous, hallucinated pipe dream. A car chase filmed mostly from within a pursued car feels suffocating because of Gray’s decision to use only sounds that the character are hearing and no soundtrack.

But his treatment of the political nature of his story fails to impress. When the mob attacks Joseph at his home, Bobby goes behind his father’s back and spontaneously volunteers for an undercover assignment, eventually becoming a cop himself. Bobby’s rise to arms implies that the ordinary citizen must take up arms against a common foe, but Gray never takes the trouble to grapple with what this means for innocent bystanders, like Bobby’s girlfriend Amada (Eva Mendes).

The film’s troubling ending rams Gray’s vigilante viewpoint home. When Bobby, now a believer in the efficacy of police brutality, murders a Russian mobster already surrounded by the cops, he returns as a hero to his fellow policemen. In the last scene, when he waits to give a speech at a police academy graduation, he says “I love you” to his brother for the first time in the whole film. That this murder brings the brothers together is disturbing enough—more chilling is the film’s brazen embracing of a confraternity of blood.

—Reviewer Kyle L. K. McAuley can be reached at kmcauley@fas.harvard.edu.