Street Kings

Rating: 1 star out of 4

What reason is there to see “Street Kings”? The ads promise a fun ride where we watch cops use power for fun and pleasures of which we must only dream. Yet the actual movie is dark, joyless and surprisingly depressing, making us feel sad and angry when it’s over. Caveat emptor indeed.

The movie stars Keanu Reeves as a corrupt LAPD officer named Tom Ludlow. It took me thirty minutes into the movie before I learned his name. Consider that the great screenwriter William Goldman said that the first fifteen minutes were the most important to establishing the story, and you get an idea of the sophistication of the writing.

An idealistic cop named Washington (Terry Crews) exposes the rampant corruption in the LAPD to the Internal Affairs department. Ludlow follows Washington one day into a convenience store to beat him up, only to watch two masked robbers gun down Washington mercilessly. Ludlow’s superiors urge him to drop the investigation so he won’t get implicated, but he continues searching anyway to find the criminals. I’m not sure why, but then again, this is a movie that does characterization by showing Ludlow drinking vodka.

The film spends most of its time in the details of Ludlow’s investigation, which involves a great deal of information. Frankly, I became increasingly indifferent. There are only so many revelations that can be made on the basis of cardboard characters before we stop caring and let everything wash over us, knowing that the ending explanation will come eventually.

My indifference was not helped by Reeve’s performance, who remains in the same dazed emotional state through all of the movie, even when he’s supposedly happy. Early on, he’s accused of being racist, to which he responds that yes, he is racist because he arrests all minority criminals but gives all the white ones a ride home. His delivery makes it impossible to tell whether he is serious or just kidding.

But I also felt an increasing level of disgust in my stomach and my head as the movie progressed. There are gunfights, interrogations, and chase scenes throughout, but they feel uninspired, and worse, unexciting and grim. At one point the cops unearth two decomposed bodies, and when they finish their work, the camera gives us a close-up of the corpses before cutting to the next scene. Is this supposed to be entertaining? Why show us such sights for the sake of showing them?

And then there is the sheer incompetence of the storytelling. Early on, Ludlow learns that Washington’s body had three different caliber bullets it, even though he was supposedly only shot by two different guns. As I walked out of the theater, I still didn’t understand where that third caliber came from, and if I understood the movie correctly, I don’t know how or why the bad guys would have put it in Washington. At another point, a character tears apart a house wall and finds the insides stuffed with large sums of money. Couldn’t that particular suspect afford a secret bank account?

The only redeeming elements are the two police captains played by Forest Whitaker and Hugh Laurie. Both are written and acted as believable policeman with principles that come into full view at the end. But the movie backs away from them, wanting instead to focus on the other characters and the story, which grows increasingly dark. There’s a message here about how no cop is completely clean, and that good cops need bad cops in order to uphold the law. Sure, that’s a depressing message, but it’s even more depressing to see it argued in such a shoddy way. Time is simply too valuable to watch such brainless cynicism.