Street Kings

There is no doubt in my mind that there are a lot of bad and crooked cops. But the cops depicted in Street Kings go beyond merely being "cooked", and fly into some sort of broad cartoon example of law enforcement gone wrong. Take the hero of the story, a grizzled and hard drinking Detective named Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves). The opening scenes depict a typical work day for the man, where he throws some mixed racial slurs at some Korean thugs, then rescues a pair of kidnapped girls, but not before he blows all the suspects away in a glorified action sequence, while still finding time to plant some evidence. And just to make him seem more unpleasant, the first thing we see him do when he gets out of bed at the very beginning is throw up in a toilet, then proceed to down mini bottles of vodka while he drives down the streets of L.A. Did I forget to mention that this guy is supposed to be the hero of the story?

Reeves plays a bad cop, but as we quickly discover, every one else on the force is even worse. They murder, they lie, they back stab and blackmail each other to no end. Tom's form of justice seems to revolve around the vigilante area, so much so that he makes Dirty Harry seem like a balanced individual. He's not afraid to torture and or kill to get what he needs out of his suspects. The only reason he's still on the force is that his superior, Captain Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker) mops up after his messes, and makes Tom come across as a hero to the media. However, not everybody's fooled. There's an internal-affairs investigator (Hugh Laurie who, despite playing a different character, seems to be giving the exact same performance he gives every week on TV's House.) who is sniffing around, and getting dangerously close to revealing Tom for the "kill first, forget about asking questions" cop that he is. It seems that one of Ludlow's former partners (Terry Crews) was going to blow the whistle on him, so Tom makes the most logical decision - Jump his former partner while he's at a convenience store and beat the crap out of him. However, some thugs burst into the store, and do the job for Tom, filling his partner with so many bullets, it's hard even for the audience to think that this was a hold up gone bad.

Captain Wander does his usual clean up job by getting rid of the security video that shows Tom cowering while his former partner is murdered. Despite having been angry at the guy, and having been in the store to break his former partner's jaw, Tom just can't quite shake the feeling that something's not right about the situation. It's right about this point that the character and the movie starts to develop a conscience, and Street Kings turns from a fairly enjoyable cop exploitation film to a convoluted mystery as Ludlow races around L.A., seeking the identities of the killers. He runs into countless dirty cops, cliched gang bangers that we've seen one too many times in other movies, and tries to find a strange kind of personal forgiveness by visiting his former partner's widow (Naomie Harris) a couple times. The movie never quite loses its kinetic energy. After all, the film's director, David Ayer, has written more of his share of cop movies in his career including the screenplays for Training Day, Dark Blue, and Harsh Times. He knows how to keep the action moving, and at least hold our interest. What he doesn't know how to do here is give us enough of a reason to care.

The movie is all trashy style and very little substance underneath. We never get a clear identity as to who Tom really is, other than he's a tough-talking cop who likes to kill his suspects in increasingly spectacular ways. A minor subplot about his wife and her death pops up every now and then to give the character a little bit of humanity, but it seems out of place. Street Kings constantly plays it so loud and broadly that these three second long quiet moments almost seem like afterthoughts added in to soften the character. How broad is this movie? Characters don't talk their dialogue when they can scream or bellow it. Blood doesn't spill when someone is shot when it can flow like a stream. There are even some moments where you can't tell if the movie is aiming for satire or what. During that opening action sequence, where Tom murders some Asian thugs, one of them is a man wearing a "Green Hornet"-like mask for no reason. I couldn't tell if it was Kill Bill-style satire or racism, and the movie doesn't slow down enough to clue us in. And when the movie tries to turn into a mystery, the revelations and "shocking" (to anyone half-asleep) plot points pile on top of each other to the point that they're more laughable than the over the top action scenes. Equally laughable is the way the screenplay allows Tom to survive by making his enemies incredibly stupid. When two villains tie him up and plan to kill him and bury him, they just stand there and keep on talking to him, giving him a chance first to free his hands, and then to plant a shovel into one of the villain's skulls. If they had just did what they were supposed to do, Tom would be out of luck, and the movie knows it.

Despite the B-level nature of the script, the talent that has been gathered is completely A-List here, which also holds our attention. Keanu Reeves, an actor who has frequently been accused of being wooden, is actually pretty good here as a conflicted and tortured cop who finds out that the dirty dealings going on at the L.A.P.D. are much worse than even he knew. He gives off a mostly quiet and distant vibe, but there always seems to be something waiting beneath the surface waiting to explode. He doesn't have quite the cool charisma of Clint Eastwood in the previously mentioned Dirty Harry films, but he gets the job done well enough. As his Captain, Forest Whitaker definitely grabs our attention. It's amazing that he can say lines like "You stared evil in the face, and won" while still retaining some if not most of his dignity. The performances are generally solid all around, and you have to wonder what this movie could have been with a more complex script. The movie is attractively shot as well, though Ayer does rely a bit on the chainsaw editing style when it's not needed. It's fine for the frantic gunfights, but during dialogue-based scenes, it gets a little silly.

Street Kings would have been more fun if it had just gone all the way with its "bad cop on the edge" premise. The movie seems to be trying to revive the feel of the badass cop hero that was so prominent in 80s action movies, but have since fallen out of favor. I'm all for it and welcome it, but when the movie tries to give the character and itself a heart, that's when things start to feel off. It doesn't know if it wants to be critical of its main character, or make him come across as tortured and misunderstood. Because Street Kings never finds a consistent view of itself, the audience is left wondering how they're supposed to feel when the end credits come.

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