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‘Street Kings’ should be dethroned
Does Street Kings set itself apart from every cop thriller ever made? It sure does. Unfortunately, what makes the movie distinct is how badly it goes wrong.
Keanu Reeves played a Los Angeles police officer before, when he led the cast of Speed as Jack Traven, the slightly unhinged but upstanding go-for-broke cop who isn’t afraid to look crazy. Reeves’ character in Street Kings is quite the contrast. He’s a completely unhinged, corrupt cop, Tom Ludlow, who isn’t afraid to break rules and bust heads.
Ludlow has a chip on his shoulder the size of Australia, having suffered the death of his wife. Determined to bag bad guys by any means necessary, Ludlow has lost his moral compass. When he investigates the death of a fellow officer with whom he had butted heads, the sea of corruption he encounters forces him to make even tougher choices than usual.
Directed by David Ayer, who wrote Training Day, and co-written by James Ellroy, author of LA Confidential, Street Kings feels like a particularly grimy cross between those two stories, but Street Kings isn’t as good as either of its forebears. The filmmakers get so carried away with being down and dirty, I couldn’t find anyone to root for. Instead of playing “good cop, bad cop,” this movie plays “bad cop, worse cop and worst cop.”
LA Confidential also wove a complex web of deceit, but what made that story so compelling was how charismatic the characters were, even if they were corrupt. No one rises to that level in Street Kings. Reeves deserves credit for trying to play a complex character, and he carries the movie well for awhile, but he can’t make villainy magnetic, as Denzel Washington did in Training Day. Reeves so overplays the surly card, his character become just another scuzzball among many.
Ayer directs the movie proficiently, serving up some solid action scenes, but not even Michael Mann could have saved the movie from the force of nature that is Forrest Whitaker’s performance as Reeves’ superior. Whitaker’s acting gradually devolves into histrionics that had the preview audience in stitches. With any luck, this will be the only lesson Whitaker takes from Cuba Gooding Jr.’s School of Squandering your Oscar-winning Talent.
Even without Whitaker’s performance, Street Kings might have been a noble misfire. With it, the movie not only misfires, it blows up in everyone’s faces.
GRADE: C-
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