LAPD Blue | Keanu Reeves seems a little out of place in the James Ellroy universe in Street Kings.
STREET KINGS
Directed by David Ayer. Starring Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker, Hugh Laurie. Now playing.
2 1/2 Stars
What kind of cop is Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves)? He awakes from a sweaty sleep at the start of David Ayer’s Street Kings and instantly checks his sidearm, stumbles to the can to spit out a mouthful of puke, then readies himself for a night of work with a few airplane bottles of vodka guzzled behind the wheel of his speeding car. An excessively saucy exchange between Ludlow and a pair of Korean businessmen in the market for a machine gun ends with Ludlow’s ass kicked and his car with its trunk full of machine guns spitting gravel at him as it speeds away.
All part of the plan, natch—Ludlow is just indulging in a little Gibsonesque masochism to lull the bad guys into a false sense of security. He tails them to a mansion, kills them and all their friends and rescues the kidnapped 14-year-old sisters they have hidden in a cage. When Ludlow’s former partner (Terry Crews) is gunned down in an apparent liquor store robbery, he finds the hit fishy and starts pursuing the killers, even though the hunt is supremely self-destructive.
In other words, he’s a not-aytpical protagonist in the world of hardboiled crime novelist James Ellroy: a dogged Los Angeles policeman obsessed with his work, half-consumed by his personal demons, with a code of honour that excludes neither brutality nor instant justice. The trope of the bent-but-not-crooked cop worked famously in Curtis Hanson’s adaptation of Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential and failed hilariously in Brian de Palma’s The Black Dahlia. Unlike those movies, Street Kings was actually screenwritten by Ellroy (with Kurt Wimmer and Jamie Moss). Director Ayer, who wrote Training Day, seems a good choice to lens Ellroy’s lowlife’s-eye view of L.A. ruled by bad cops, but the result feels oddly bereft of the trademark intensity Ellroy conjures on paper.
The blame would be pretty easy to lay at Keanu Reeves’ feet—he’s not especially suited to a role that calls for him to display seething, obsessive rage, but as usual, he’s plausible as a guy just figuring out what’s going on around him. Ludlow remains a cipher for most of the movie, his actions determined by the necessities of plot rather than any coherent sense of who this guy is and why a pretty, intelligent nurse (Martha Higareda) would want anything to do with him. But she’s just one unconvincing detail among dozens in a movie that constantly undermines its harsh, gritty tone with cheap action-flick overkill.
In truth, none of the stars are doing their best work here—Forest Whitaker’s wack-a-doo portrayal of Captain Jack Wander, commander of Ludlow’s squad of renegade cops, leaves little doubt who will represent the most heinous lapse of morality in the many layers of savage corruption. Hugh Laurie, as the LAPD internal investigator hounding Ludlow for his frequent and deadly discharge of a firearm, also seems slightly demented. The actors are obliged to say things like “Do the department a favour, Captain Biggs, and wash your mouth out with buckshot” and “Of course I remember you—I did the autopsy on your wife”—so why not play it a little crackers?
Cedric the Entertainer, Common, and The Game enjoy brief cameos that seem positively naturalistic by comparison, and there’s a bunch of bad po-leece who seem to enjoy a good murder, led by Jay Mohr with a funny mustache. Chris Evans is in it for a little bit too and Naomie Harris shows up as the lovely widow who becomes Ludlow’s vehicle for atonement.
There’s some exciting chasing and plenty of gunplay, as the filmmaker’s interest in his main character’s evolving moral quandaries is consistently trumped by his interest in making his violence look super-cool. Like most vigilante yarns, this one has a self-justifying streak that excuses the protagonist’s penchant for cruelty as it hurtles toward an ending that’s just dumb. Not that it matters much—whatever its hardboiled intentions, Street Kings is definitely not to be taken seriously. Unlike all those other Keanu Reeves movies....
