It's a shame when you go into a movie not expecting much, then are pleasantly surprised, only to have the director and writer forego their principles at the last minute and offer up instead the plate of slop you initially expected, while euphemistically going "Ha, ha!" in their best Nelson Muntz voice.
Such is the case with Street Kings, a violent movie about police corruption and its long reaching effects, which starts out with much promise but ends up writhing atop a heap of cliches.
Keanu Reeves(The Matrix trilogy, The Lake House) plays Detective Tom Ludlow, a loner cop busting gangs in the dark streets of L.A. When we first meet Tom, he's waking up in bed fully dressed for the job, even going so far as to sleep with his gun. He chugs two mini bottles of vodka as he heads off for another day in helltown. Tom's wife, it turns out, died five years earlier in the midst of having an affair, and Tom has never gotten over her death, even if he's gotten over the circumstances. Tom's first job for the day is to lure some Asian gang-bangers into an arms deal. While it seems at first this is simply a standard cop drama setup, subtle clues placed in earlier scenes by David Ayer(only previous direct-ing credit: 2005's Harsh Times) clue us in that there is more going on here. Once Tom has managed to do what needs to be done(no spoilers), his boss Captain Jack Wander(Forest Whitaker) shows up with the rest of Tom's team the Vice Special, a likewise group of super-cops. Even though part of the team, Tom's been a loner since both his wife's death and a difference of opinion with ex-partner Washington(Terry Crews), and Wander applauds his superstar for his heroics, which as a side effect manage to nab Wander an impending promotion.
Mildly injured in the course of duty, Tom is checked out at the hospital by his nurse girlfriend Grace(Martha Higareda), then unofficially interviewed by another captain, James Biggs (Hugh Laurie). While Laurie has accomplished quite a few things on tv and in cinema(The Big Empty among them), the fact he is best known as tv's House is his doom in this part. Although not dispensing pills or medical advice, Laurie's Biggs does offer quite a bit of advice, along with threats(it's weakly established the character works along the same lines as IAB) and is essentially playing House with a badge. There's even one scene where Laurie noticibly starts to limp, then quickly loses it. It's not to say his performance is bad; it's not by any stretch...it's just that you can see the same thing on tv every week for free.
The movie begins to pick up its pace and start traveling down darker territory once Washington is killed in a bodega shoot-up by masked gang members, and one of Tom's own bullets unintentionally winds up in his ex-partner's back. Once Wander again arrives on the scene with his men, inclu-ding Jay Mohr(Ghost Whisperer, Even Money) as a Vice Special member, we begin to get a sense that not only is Tom slightly askew in his police procedurals, but so are the men he works with, as Wander urges him to dump the sur-veillance disc which caught the murder.
While the cast still manages to keep us enthralled and the story mostly veers away from standard cop cliches, ultimately Street Kings is revealed to be a wannabe cinematic stand-in for The Shield, with the rest of the Vice Special squad stand-ing in for Vic Mackey's Strike Team. Both Wander and Biggs never let Tom forget that he's a dirty cop on the edge(sus-pected of beating a criminal with a phone book, but whatever other crimes Wander has supposedly helped him cover are never revealed). Once the investigation into Washington's death goes deeper, the ballistic evidence that could out Tom and end his career is hand-delivered to him for disposal by Mohr's character. Even being temporarily assigned to desk duty at the victims' complaint unit, responsible for rooting out bad cops, does no good: Tom is informed that no matter what complaints he forwards, nothing will ever be done about them, even if he receives a civilian complaint about himself. The seeming moral of the movie? The entire system's corrupt, so if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. With cinematic pessimism such as this feeding the public mindset, is it any wonder more cops turn bad every day, and the few good ones on the job find it harder to hold onto their conscience?
Things don't get any better with the introduction of Chris Evans(Fantastic Four I & II, Sunshine) who plays Detective Paul Diskant(named such only so Tom can forever lamely refer to him as "Disco"), assigned at first to investigate the forensics behind Washington's shooting, but then reluctantly truncate it on orders from Wander. Facing a crisis of con-science over Washington's shooting, and seeing that Diskant is miffed over implicating himself in wrongdoing, Tom choos-es to ignore all warnings and go after the suspected bangers who did in his former partner. It is almost precisely at this point that Street Kings veers off its established course of believable characters, decent if not solid storytelling, and interesting situations to head directly to the intersection of Cliche Boulevard and Unbelievable Avenue. The only good thing which follows in its wake is the score by Graeme Revell (The Ruins, AEon Flux), whose music is at all times powerful, evocative and darkly disturbing. Even a powerful appear-ance by rapper Common(American Gangster, the upcoming
--maybe--Justice League) doesn't help, while a miscast Cedric the Entertainer(All of Us, The Honeymooners) as a street tough only hurts.
Once the proverbial crap hits the fan, it's all downhill. While in spite of his Shatner-esque stilted delivery, Keanu Reeves manages to turn in one of his more convincing per-formances, Whitaker's Wander tilts between coolly logical and shrewd to an outright nearly shrieking ninny when any-thing seems to remotely affect his less-than-noble squad. Toward the end, Whitaker hits such a fever pitch of arm waving hysteria that he is literally licking drool from his lip. This clip will undoubtedly play well and often during the next set of Razzie Awards.
While the first half of the script by vets James Ellroy(L.A. Confidential, Stay Clean), Kurt Wimmer(Equilibrium, The Recruit) and newcomer Jamie Moss is fairly strong and starts to deliver more than expected, unfortunately the rest falls back to rest comfortably on its laurels, delving into cliches that have popped up in virtually every corrupt cop movie ever made. If you're going to go for the bad cop theme, then either spend your money wisely and buy The Shield box sets, or tune into it on tv for free. The stories there are far more gripping, and at least Michael Chiklis makes his Vic Mackey into a bad cop you can care about.
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Derivative: Not since Doomsday has a movie poster managed to be so ugly, and make a film look so uninteresting.
"THE SHIELD" WANNABE
Street Kings starts off strong...but can't help giving in to storytelling laziness
Reeves(left) plays Det. Tom Ludlow, otherwise known as Vic Mackey-Lite. Whitaker plays his boss, and might walk away this year with a much-deserved Razzie.
"Trust us, Keanu...no cliches here! There has never been another scene like this where a bunch of bad cops meet to discuss their position of power{cough! Prince of the City, cough! Dark Blue, cough! Training Day!}
"Look, I don't care what role I'm playing here! I play a doctor on tv...and my advice is to pull the plug on this film, before it devel-ops an infective case of acute Derivitus Cliche-chlamydia!"
"Yo, this movie be straight-up nightmare! That's right...you'll be screamin' in your sleep for days man, wonderin' where the f**k your money went!"
