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" Street
Kings Review " |
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Posted on
9:00 a.m. PST April 20, 2008 |
By Wesley Morris, Globe Staff
04/11/2008
In "Street Kings," a hard-boiled Keanu Reeves spends a few
intense days trying to find the men who framed him for his
ex-police partner's murder. In every sense, the movie is
like a Rockstar Games title: The Los Angeles it has
reconstructed is endless and complex, but the action is
mindless - shoot, kill, win. Reeves, meanwhile, has the kind
of semi-alive, pixilated face that turns up in
 Grand
Theft Auto or Midnight Club.
Reeves is playing Tom Ludlow, a widowed vice cop. His
murdered ex-partner (Terry Crews) snitched to Internal
Affairs about some of Tom's past misdeeds. Tom is furious.
When some cholos shoot the partner dead, Tom's culpability
seems plausible to department higher-ups, including an
annoying police captain (Hugh Laurie) and Tom's power-hungry
boss (Forest Whitaker), who puts him in a uniform and gives
him a desk job fielding complaints until the case blows
over. But Tom's hot to catch the killers, and the movie
works too hard to build a narrative excuse for all the
shootouts and dead Asians and rap stars on the floor when
they're over. Not to mention all the actors - Chris Evans,
Laurie, Cedric the Entertainer, Naomie Harris, Jay Mohr,
Common - who go underused. That's OK since by the end of the
film, Whitaker has done enough acting for all of them.
"Street Kings" is nonsense, and yet the crooked, racialized
world underneath the soulless mayhem is pretty fascinating.
Ten minutes in, before Reeves's character busts two
Korean-Americans looking to buy guns, he zings them with
slurs - and not as part of some undercover shtick, either.
The racism is a weapon. Tom wouldn't say he's a racist. Some
of his best friends are black. His nurse-girlfriend is
Hispanic. But in this movie race is all anybody sees when
they look at anybody else.
Like a lot of movies about the LAPD, this one is a grim and
vulgar hall of mirrors. Having seen "Training Day," with a
gonzo Denzel Washington, and "Harsh Times," with a gonzo
Christian Bale, I'm familiar with what the director and
co-writer David Ayer thinks about Los Angeles law
enforcement. A cop is the boogeyman - a menace to society, a
menace to himself.
In Ayer's movies, the police aren't purely bad, because
there is no bad, by virtue of there being no appreciable
good. Maybe this seems extra-rich in "Street Kings" thanks
to whatever contributions James Ellroy made to the movie's
script: Corruption is the way of this world. But Ayer
doesn't use his cynicism to build a consistent, complete
movie. He's not an explorative director. He's a guy.
This is a movie that likes its cliches, cheap melodrama, and
guns. Ayer appears to like the thrill of violence more than
its philosophical underpinnings, so the movie is caught
between the silly and the profound. When Tom asks, "What
happened to putting the bad guys in jail," your heart goes
out to him. He's still thinking like a cop, not like an
avatar in a video game.
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