In the early moments of Street Kings, a Los Angeles vice
detective, played more purposefully than usual by Keanu Reeves, starts his
morning by vomiting, which is no doubt part of his daily routine. His first
order of business is to slip into a nearby convenience store, pick up some
airplane-size bottles of vodka, and chase his hangover with a little hair of
the dog. He then meets a pair of Korean thugs to exchange guns for cash; breaks
into a home, guns blazing, without a warrant; and later tries to intimidate a
former partner who's threatening to rat him out to Internal Affairs. Within 10
or 15 minutes, it's established that he's a drunk, that he operates outside
procedural boundaries, and that corruption hangs over him like Pigpen's cloud
of filth. He's also one of the good guys.
Welcome to James Ellroy's L.A. It was
perhaps inevitable that Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) would continue his
collaboration with David Ayer, whose screenplays for Training Day, Dark Blue (co-written by Ellroy),
and Harsh Times
(which Ayer also directed) take as received wisdom the institutional corruption
and racism that pervade the LAPD. Working from an original story by Ellroy (who
co-scripted with Kurt Wimmer and Jamie Moss), Ayer's overwrought Street
Kings
splashes around in the slop, but its conclusions seem a little rote from these
two, who have both expressed their bottomless cynicism more effectively in the
past.
Cast smartly against type, Reeves plays
another in a long line of Ayer anti-heroes, though he's hard-pressed to match
the snake-oil charisma of Denzel Washington in Training Day or Kurt Russell in Dark
Blue. The
soupy Ellroy plot places Reeves in a convenience store as two masked gunman
shoot his former partner (Terry Crews) in a botched robbery attempt. Reeves
immediately falls under suspicion of having arranged the hit to avoid being
implicated by the victim, but he gets support from powerful vice captain Forest
Whitaker, who has plenty of skeletons in his own closet.
Whitaker's freewheeling team of detectives,
bonded less by true loyalty than by the taint of extracurricular shenanigans,
recalls Michael Chiklis and his "Strike Team" on the FX show The Shield, and the comparison does Street
Kings no
favors. The film doesn't have the time to detail the history of Whitaker's gang
or delineate their individual relationships; instead, it tries to compensate
with over-the-top intensity, as if sheer volume were an aesthetic value. After
all the actorly fireworks, Street Kings concludes that the LAPD is an institution
where even the well-intentioned can't work clean. Okay. What else?