B-
David Ayer is apparently trying to corner the market on L.A. mean street movies. First there was “Training Day,” which he wrote, and then “Harsh Times,” which was also his directorial debut. Now we have this picture, which is sort of an amalgam of those two with a dose of a contemporary “L.A. Confidential” tossed into the mix—completely understandable as it’s based on a script co-written by James Ellroy. The result is an action melodrama in which police corruption is almost as rampant as the violence, both righteous and far from it.
The focal character in “Street Kings” is Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves), the most volatile, risk-taking detective on the special vice unit headed by Captain Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker), his mentor. Tom, whose loss of his wife several years earlier has left him reckless about his own safety, is one of those typical movie cops who are quick on the trigger and even quicker to skirt the rules, but get the job done; and Wander approvingly watches his back.
But after Tom single-handedly eliminates a gang of Korean kidnappers, he finds himself in the sights of IAD Captain Biggs (Hugh Laurie), and is told by his boss that the guy ratting on him to Internal Affairs is his former partner Terrence Washington (Terry Crews). Though told to stay away from Washington, Ludlow tracks him to a convenience store, only to witness him being gunned down by two masked men armed with automatic weapons. His presence there puts him even more in Biggs’s cross-hairs, and forces him to work with clean-cut novice homicide detective Paul Diskant (Chris Evans) to track down the killers and uncover the reasons behind the hit.
From this point the plot thickens, with false identities, buried bodies, crooked undercover agents, bags full of money and double and triple-crosses all in the mix (not to mention a likable, garishly dressed hustler called Scribble—a kind of updated Huggy Bear—played by no less than Cedric the Entertainer). But in the final analysis the ingredients feel awfully familiar, and the final revelation about who’s behind the nefarious goings-on is unlikely to surprise anyone who’s ever seen a movie before. (Or television cop procedurals: you might not be able to watch this sort of thing in network fare every night in these days of reality programming and forensic thrillers, but it was pretty standard issue in decades past.)
On the other hand, “Street Kings” is expertly mounted and strongly cast, even if the material doesn’t always bring out their best. Gabriel Beristain’s gritty cinematography works well in tandem with Ayer’s propulsive direction to suggest dark, violent forces at work, and the action sequences—like the inevitable street chase—are efficiently staged and sharply edited by Jeffrey Ford. Reeves makes a suitably brooding anti-hero—a darker, meaner, more cynical version of the agent he played in Kathryn Bigelow’s “Point Break”—and he carries off the bursts of action with aplomb. By contrast the talented Whitaker is all empty bombast, and talented though he is, even he can’t pull off Wander’s overwrought final scene; Laurie, who’s made such an impression on “House,” is pretty much wasted here; and Evans is even blander than Ethan Hawke was as the similar naif in “Training Day.” And while Cedric is, as usual, an ingratiating presence, Jay Mohr overdoes the gum-smacking smirk as Wander’s right-hand sergeant. The performances further down the line are competent without being outstanding.
Among dirty-cop actioners, “Street Kings” is hardly royalty; despite the title, it’s more like a pretender to the throne. But like Reeves’s Ludlow, it gets the job done.