COP movies and TV shows are so omnipresent that it’s difficult to imagine anything radically new happening to the genre. The best one can hope for nowadays is a variation on a theme.

    The director, Antoine Fuqua, is best known for directing “Training Day,” an overrated cop movie starring Oscar-

    winning Denzel Washington as a good-bad cop who might have received his training in Hades.

    The Brooklyn in this new film isn’t far removed from that location. Three cops, all of them in varying stages of psychological meltdown, gradually come apart before our eyes, leaving behind them a wake of corpses and cash. If ever there was a nonrecruitment movie for police work, this is it.

    “Brooklyn’s Finest” burrows deep into a rough corner of the Borough of Kings, and also into the collective memory of generations of meaty, emotional movies about New York City cops in trouble. The picture is set in the present, though you might not guess as much from the bad-old-days-level body count and the Sidney Lumet (“Prince of the City,” say, or “Q and A”) aura hanging around the three suffering, ethically compromised policemen at its center.

    Fuqua takes a packed, hard-working script by the first-timer (and former New York City transit worker) Michael C. Martin, and paints an infernal triptych of panic, defeat and good intentions gone bad. Sal (Ethan Hawke) is a detective whose money troubles — a houseful of kids, twins on the way, a wife (Lili Taylor) with health problems — lead him twitching and sweating down the path of unrighteousness.

    It’s likely that Eddie (Richard Gere) has been on that road most of his career, an undistinguished run of flat-footing that’s a week away from ending when we meet him. The first morning of that last week on the job, Eddie wakes up, takes a slug of whiskey and sticks a pistol in his mouth. Cowardice — or perhaps laziness — must be what prevents him from pulling the trigger, since he does not behave like a man who has any reason to live.

    Following Eddie around as he glumly helps break in a succession of rookies — a situation that is like a depressive sendup of both “Training Day” and Mr. Gere’s role in Mike Figgis’s “Internal Affairs” — you wonder if some kind of redemption might be waiting around the bend. You kind of suspect there might be, which is one sign that “Brooklyn’s Finest” is working in familiar genre territory. But it is a testament to Gere’s discipline and Fuqua’s nimbleness that Eddie’s every action seems grounded in a coherent, if contradictory, temperament. Eddie mopes around, keeping company with a prostitute (Shannon Kane) who kindly acts like a lover, his close-set eyes squinting as though he were trying to recall some vague notion of a better, more upstanding life.

    The third strand in this sad braid of blue is Tango (Don Cheadle), who has a clearer ethical sense than Sal or Eddie, but whose undercover work assignment places him in just as much moral and physical danger. His ambition and his sense of professional duty conflict with his loyalty to Caz (Wesley Snipes, sly and dapper as ever), a drug dealer who once saved Tango’s life.

    Mostly, Tango, Sal and Eddie take their separate routes to ruin, occasionally crossing paths without acknowledging one another. But they also exist within a thick, sticky web of relationships and alliances, which is also to say in a hive of effective supporting performances. Ms. Kane and Brian F. O’Byrne (as Sal’s dogged, good-hearted partner) are especially fine, but even players who appear in only a scene or two make a strong impression. Fans of “The Wire” will recognize a few cast members (notably Michael K. Williams, as one of Caz’s underlings), and at its best “Brooklyn’s Finest” achieves something like the dramatic density of that series.

    Not that the film attains — or, to be fair, really attempts — the kind of novelistic sweep that made “The Wire” so extraordinary. “Brooklyn’s Finest,” despite Fuqua’s canny use of real locations, mainly in Brownsville, is hardly a work of realism. Rather, like so many of its models (and like “Training Day”), it is a melodrama and a morality play, a study of character under pressure using the brute urban facts of greed, violence and fear for background, mood and stage equipment.

    Particular scenes are not always entirely credible, but the sheer charismatic force of much of the acting keeps you in the movie. As the machinery of the plot accelerates, however, Martin’s script becomes dangerously overheated.

    The climax is both chaotically messy and fussily neat, as the bullets fly a little too frequently and hit their targets with clean, hollow thumps of significance.

    It’s shown in cinemas in Hong Kong. (SD-Agencies)