Early on in Brooklyn's Finest, we're introduced to a group of drug dealers working for Wesley Snipes' character and infiltrated by Don Cheadle's character. They have a room where they play videogames. The videogames aren't specified at first, but the videogaming is specifically mentioned.

Later, the movie gives us a more detailed look into this den of iniquity. We see lots of topless chicks, drugs, and even literal money laundering. And then we pan into the videogame room. The controllers are wireless, but the game is for the Playstation 2. It's the first Mercenaries, and it gets a few seconds of full-screen screentime. You can specifically tell it's Mercenaries because there's a bar for "SK morale", which is the South Korean morale in one of the missions.

It's not footage of anyone actually playing the game in any meaningful sense. The player is standing in front of a jeep. He's firing his gun at the hood of the jeep, which blows up and kills him. My guess is that director Antoine Fuqua specifically asked for a scene of the player dying to, uh, I dunno, reinforce the inherent nihilism of a life of crime. Or something. Later in the movie, another high-ranking criminal explains to Snipes' character that "videogames and television cleaned up the streets". And the right half of the game makes a few appearances during the climactic scene.

I'm sure there's a message here, but all I could think was that it's a pretty lousy set of drug dealers that can only afford a Playstation 2 and a notoriously bad port of a five-year-old shooter.



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