Eddie is the product of foster care and longs to make good by opening a birthday-cake bakery. He's a hard-luck kid, with amusingly elliptical thinking and reactions and a trick nasal voice that Mos Def uses comically to slur the rhythm of his scenes. As Eddie, Mos Def is as much on his own adolescent-misfit's planet as Jerry Lewis was, and, like Lewis's well-meaning simpletons, he's both cranky and a sweetie.

Frank is the point man for the killing, so now the former partners are pitted against each other, with Frank (wrongly) assuming that Jack is long past being able to pull off what he's attempting. Frank and Jack have three major confrontations: when Frank shows up in the bar to take care of Eddie; when they're trapped in a basement on opposite sides of a wall with guns pointed at each other; and when Jack has spirited Eddie to safety and shows up in the court house garage intending to testify himself, though it will besmirch the department (in the process of cleansing it, of course) and even send Jack himself to prison.

I go into this amount of detail not because it's interesting, but to lay out the conventional symbolic structure of the plot beneath the pseudo-naturalistic frankness about big-city police forces. Simply put, Jack is a sinful knight in need of redemption. The main villain is his partner, which is to say his fraternal twin: in the course of the movie Jack, the part of the soul that can be saved, has to reject and battle against Frank, the part of the soul that can't. The soul's struggle against the temptation to do evil is thus personified and externalized in the good cop-bad cop showdown.

Jack and Frank, both of them criminal cops, are paired like the two thieves crucified on either side of Jesus. One of the malefactors rails against Jesus while the other rebukes his fellow ("Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss") and is saved (Luke 23:39-43).

Eddie, the comic innocent, represents the virtues that require martial defense in a world in which the author of evil freely sows temptation, even among those sworn to do good. The last scene shows Jack blowing the candles out on a birthday cake that Eddie has made for him and on which Eddie has spelled out in icing a list of people who have changed for the better, including Eddie, Jack, and Barry White. It's not a birthday cake, of course, but a rebirthday cake. By saving Eddie, Jack has saved himself.

Eddie doesn't have to die to redeem Jack, which is another sign you're in the pre-modern realm of romance, the genre that fulfills the audience's wish for a hero capable of fantastically effective action against the spiritual Enemy. In a modern movie set among figures serving the executive branch of a democratic government, this is a bad fit. What makes romance great, when it is great, is that it's a symbolic demonstration of deeply and widely held spiritual values.