In an interview on “The Colbert Report” last week, actor Don Cheadle said his new film, “Brooklyn’s Finest,” was shot in a part of East Brooklyn so cut off from the glitz of New York City that he doubted the residents of that neighborhood had ever seen a film crew before.

"Brooklyn's Finest"

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Whether or not that’s true, one thing's for certain: No matter how cut off those folks may be, “Brooklyn’s Finest” is a film even they have seen countless times before.

Embodying one of three disparate storylines in the film, Cheadle (“Ocean’s Thirteen”) plays Tango, a trusted lieutenant of drug kingpin Caz (Wesley Snipes, “Blade: Trinity”). While Caz and his crew trust Tango like a brother, he happens to be an undercover cop, working to get Caz’s drug organization shut down.

Meanwhile, in another plotline, Ethan Hawke (“Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead”) plays a righteous cop forced to steal from drug dealers to take care of his family. Finally, Richard Gere (“Amelia”) plays a depressed, aging police officer who hasn’t cared about the job in years, but suddenly finds his emotions awakened as he works to break up a prostitution ring.

While the film has plenty of guns, drugs and sex, it’s annoyingly clear from the very first scene that it seeks to be something greater. The deliberate, overwrought theatrical procession that unfolds across a grueling 133 minutes seems to have been intended as a film counterpart to “The Wire.” The several distinct storylines populated by the sprawl of intermittently interesting characters show that the film sought to be a gritty, enveloping character drama that spans magnificently across genres and endures in our memories as a transcendent cinematic masterpiece.

Needless to say, it falls well short of accomplishing anything of that nature. More surprisingly, it fails even as a conventional police drama, perhaps owing to its desperation to achieve more. While all the performances are solid — Cheadle and Snipes especially — the persistent blandness of the writing and direction simply cannot be overcome.

All three storylines are propelled by one cliché after another — too many to even count — before converging predictably into a bloody final sequence that achieves new levels of miscalculation and confusion. There are surprises to be sure, but none of the cathartic relevance and emotional depth of similar scenes in better movies like “The Departed” or anything by Sidney Lumet.

What we get from "Finest" is a fuming hot mess in which who lives and who dies seems decided not by what makes thematic sense, but rather by who would look the coolest walking toward the camera in slow motion as the credits roll.