I bet director Ayer and writer James Ellroy have quite the collection of parking tickets between them. If it’s not parking tickets, then something the LAPD’s done has certainly irked them. Ellroy penned L.A. Confidential, and Ayer wrote the screenplay for Training Day. They both contributed to Dark Blue and have joined forces once again for Street Kings, yet another tale of police corruption in the city of angels. So even if they don’t have a lot of parking citations right now, if they keep this up, something tells me they will soon.
Reeves plays Detective Tom Ludlow, a cop as dirty as he is invincible. Early in the film, he treats a group of Asian gang members to a string of racial slurs, before gunning all of them down and planting weapons around the crime scene. It’s all to save two kidnapped girls, so we know he’s not all bad. And his captain (Whitaker) is quick to bury all incriminating evidence and make Ludlow look like a hero. Promotions all around!
Everything seems to be going well until Ludlow’s former partner starts talking to Internal Affairs. Enraged, Ludlow tracks him down at a convenience store to confront him when, suddenly, two lowlifes burst in with machine guns and replace Ludlow’s partner’s vital organs with lead. The security-camera footage doesn’t make Ludlow look good. Neither does the slug from his gun that accidentally found its way into his partner’s back during the crossfire. Again, the captain cleans up the crime scene, but determined to learn the truth behind the hit, Ludlow begins to dig up a trail of corruption that leads (where else?) all the way to the top.
We’ve all seen this story before, but never with quite so many stock characters. There’s the partner who must be avenged, the fresh-faced rookie who may as well have a target on his chest and superior officers who like to bark things like, “Either launch a formal investigation or get the hell out of my office!” And Reeves’ burn-out supercop stereotype is especially bland. He’s far too stoic to convincingly play a guy who chugs mini bottles of vodka while driving.
The film quickly boils down to: investigate, discover corruption, execute corrupt cop, repeat. In the end, the villain turns out to be exactly whom we knew it was 10 minutes into the film, and it feels like Street Kings took a really long time to get to where we knew it was going all along.
Street Kings
**
Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker,
Hugh Laurie
Directed by David Ayer
Rated R