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Based on James Ellroy's novel, Street Kings is set in Los Angeles' blood-soaked streets, traversed by widowed LAPD Detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) whose carte blanche methods of obliterating suspects with his service revolver are threatened when his former partner Terrence Washington turns Internal Affairs informant. Accustomed to having his violent "missions" smoothed over with the help of Captain Wander (Forest Whitaker), Tom thumbs his nose at the inclosing IA officers in order to find the gunmen responsible for shooting Washington down during a convenience store heist.
A combination of implausible plot points, and the miscasting of television's Hugh Laurie as Internal Affairs chief Captain Biggs, hampers a convoluted crime thriller that is nonetheless entertaining for its grotesque action sequences.
Writer/director David Ayer made a splash with his Bad Lieutenant-inspired script for Training Day. It was a thoroughly modern version of a corrupt police mentality that Americans continue to see reflected in the newspapers. Unarmed suspects get shot with 50 bullets, and cops go free after lip-service trials allow communities to wring out their tears before moping away with little sense of justice being served.
It's this dire state of affairs that Ayer addresses with a comic perversion that views cops and criminals as not just the same brand of monster, but part of the same entity.
From the looks of Ludlow's squalid apartment, you'd never guess that he was once married. It makes sense that his wife died while committing an act of adultery because this isn't the kind of guy to make a woman feel safe and secure.
He's a career cop concerned with keeping his gun clean for its perpetual use.
And if Tom's familiarity with racist viewpoints allows him to verbally belittle every Tyrone, Ernesto, Nam and Ethan he comes into contact with, so much the better. Whether or not he's really a racist at heart is beside the point.
Like Denzel Washington's character in Training Day, Keanu Reeves' Tom Ludlow exists to strategically execute bad guys who, like him, frequently wear body armor and are armed to the teeth. He doesn't have any grand aspirations beyond humiliating, injuring and killing criminals with impunity.
There's shock value in the ripe dialogue between Tom and the three Korean crooks attempting to purchase a machine gun from him in a parking lot deal that leaves Tom bloodied on the ground — his car and gun taken in exchange for his salty prattle. But Tom's bruises are a small price to pay for him to follow the suspects to their fetish-fueled cathouse.
What follows is a one-man guts-and-glory mission that leaves brain matter splattered on walls and pints of oozing blood pooled on the floor. The subtext here is that you don't have to look to Iraq to witness combat-style assaults.
Street Kings gets a tonal shake-up from its mix of surprise casting for secondary characters. Talent typically thought of for their comedic skills hold their own with the exception of Laurie, whose television persona follows him like a vile odor. Jay Mohr, Terry Crews and Cedric The Entertainer all give credible dramatic performances in plot-mapping roles that help mask the film's glaring disregard for realism.
If Street Kings seems overtly alienated from reality, however, it serves to make a backhanded point about the surreal nature of police-committed massacres like New York's Amadou Diallo case and the recent murder of Sean Bell. That's not to say that the film is pro or con on either side of the men in blue, merely that we are living in a time of heightened violence that taunts all logic.
The film's chain of brutal climax sequences blurs so many lines that you come away from it believing that anarchy in the streets is just a dirty little byproduct of democracy. Nobody eats "freedom fries" anymore. Grade: B-
Opens April 11. Check out theaters and show times, see the film's trailer and find nearby bars and restaurants here.
