Film Review:
Street Kings
by Brett Buckalew
When hard-boiled crime-fiction maestro James Ellroy (author of “L.A. Confidential” and “The Black Dahlia”) and the equally pessimistic filmmaker David Ayer (whose screenplays for Training Day and Dark Blue portrayed the LAPD as a force more fearsome and corrupt than any band of hoodlums) collaborate on a cop movie, it’s safe to assume that the result will be free of any selfless, badge-wearing heroes saving kittens from trees. After all, it’s institutional dirt and duplicity, not altruism that excites these two chroniclers of the City of Angels’ most devilish elements. So it’s hardly a surprise that Street Kings, directed by Ayer from a script co-written by Ellroy (along with Kurt Wimmer and Jamie Moss), offers up a vision of L.A.’s alleged finest as a den of greedy, double-crossing jackals. As it happens, the film, which adheres to tried-and-true procedural form, is a bit short on surprises, save for a couple of nifty plot twists in the third act. And yet, proving that not every good yarn need be an original one, Street Kings still succeeds as a lean, gritty, unpretentious model of genre craftsmanship, bolstered by Ellroy’s crackling, profane dialogue and Ayer’s pedal-to-the-metal energy.
The film’s enjoyably labyrinthine story revolves around Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves), a perpetual vodka swiller but brutally efficient LAPD vice officer who witnesses the murder of his ex-partner (Terry Crews) and accidentally fires a round into the victim while trying to ward off the killers. Ludlow’s boss, Captain Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker), is inclined to bury the evidence of Ludlow’s errant bullet, which is typical of Wander’s truth-bending vice squad, and to get Ludlow as far away from the ensuing investigation as possible. But Ludlow, suspicious of a connection between the murdered cop’s plans to rat out the squad’s more ethically dubious members to Internal Affairs, is intent on solving the murder case behind his superiors’ backs.
Ludlow, with years of evidence tampering and a history as a bitter cuckold to his now dead wife behind him, makes for a tortured, flawed protagonist. A slightly weathered Reeves plays him with hard-edged authority. The star is backed up by lively supporting turns from the likes of Hugh Laurie, hilariously abrasive as a confrontational Internal Affairs investigator, and Chris Evans, who brings welcome smarts to the stock role of a wet-behind-the-ears rookie assigned to the murder Ludlow witnessed.
Evans’ character is far from the only stock element to be found in the film, but Street Kings isn’t the kind of movie that breeds contempt from the viewer’s familiarity with all of its secondhand parts. It doesn’t aspire to the dramatic weight of something like Training Day; it operates instead in a trashy, propulsive B-movie key. It asks nothing of the viewer but to surrender to the gutter poetry of Ellroy’s politically incorrect banter, the grisly force of Ayer’s action-set pieces, and the willfully convoluted zigzags of the plot, all of which turn out to be easy to do. Nasty and kinetic in all the right ways, the film is a testament to the simple pleasures of watching a
formula picture done right.
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