Antoine Fuqua has bloodied us and thrilled us with such gritty dramas as Training Day, Tears of the Sun, and Shooter, where heroes are anything but and the line between good and evil is often crisscrossed in the sand. Brooklyn's Finest is no different, with a cast of police officers who struggle with their place in the world over the course of a week while racial tensions bubble to the point of explosion. Channeling Training Day, Boondock Saints, and Pride and Glory, the movie pops with tension and morality questions to keep your brain buzzing throughout, and leave you wondering in the end.

Eddie (Richard Gere) is less than a week from retirement, having spent a career avoiding confrontation and danger, and dulling his pain with booze and prostitution; Sal (Ethan Hawke), a good family man and practicing Catholic, begins to slowly unravel while taking drug money from each raid while also trying to move his growing family out of their mold-infested house; Tango (Don Cheadle) wants to get out of his undercover spot as Caz's (Wesley Snipes) righthand man, while dealing with the bureaucracy that holds him back from advancement and keeps him separated from his wife.

When Eddie refuses to play ball on a "bad shoot" and go on record that the shooting victim was a drug dealer, you have to wonder what motivation he has for his decision. Is this some kind of last ditch effort to be the kind of person he wishes he was, or is he just thumbing his nose at the man? You expect him to feel relief at retirement but his closeout of the long and unspectacular career ends with more of a "that's it" than an "attaboy." That's the kind of regular and problematic situation that Fuqua mixes in with the bloodbath that always follows the gradual, skin-crawling crime thriller he's working up to.

Cheadle's undercover cop is more "righteous" but his internal confusion is just as high. At one point, in the midst of climax and catastrophe, his handler Bill (Will Patton) shoves his self-righteousness and anger back in his face, pointing out that "you got what you wanted." Sal struggles with that, too: what does he really want? And Gere's Eddie finds out that it doesn't always work out like Pretty Woman's happily-ever-after in real life when your "best girl" is a prostitute making tons of money. Will the end justify the means? Will retirement, promotion, or wealth satisfy each of these men independently or have they lied themselves into doing the wrong thing and then not really receiving what they wanted all along?

Each of the men have an opportunity to make things right, to choose to turn back from the way they've been swimming with the tide, but the pretty ending isn't always in the cards... especially when Fuqua is directing. It's like a Choose Your Own Adventure where you repeatedly want to keep your finger in the page so that when something bad happens, you can go back and pick a different path for these guys. Still, we're left with the kinds of notions that I find gripping: When do we recognize that our lives are in need of a drastic turnaround? Can we make the change by ourselves or do we need help? Both Tango and Sal have someone try to step in an help them out, but even their responses to the intercession is different. We're a lot like that, too: we often have people try to save us from our addictions and self-destructive behavior, we have God's grace reaching out to us in ways we can't see or understand all of the time, and we seem hell-bent on the destiny we assume is ours. Can anything stop us from the path of destruction we're on?

Fuqua's movie is gripping and sad, and clever, too, in the ways that it weaves the three "independent" stories together, especially by the end. The Blu-ray shimmers with the clarity of action and the indecision of the moments, busting out featurettes on undercover cops, Fuqua's commentary, and much more to satisfy your taste for the thrill. This one isn't pretty but it shows a modern day parable side to the choices we make both by our decisions and indecisions.

What will you choose to do today?