Review: Street Kings

It's not very often that the "credits line" in a movie poster will cause you to look twice, but I was both curious and intrigued when I read that David Ayer, Kurt Wimmer and James Ellroy were collaborating on a movie called Street Kings. Ayer is a prolific screenwriter who digs cop stories (he wrote Dark Blue, Training Day, S.W.A.T., and The Fast and the Furious) and recently directed his debut effort: the seriously underrated Harsh Times. Kurt Wimmer, on the other end of the genre spectrum, is the writer / director of sci-fi flicks like Equilibrium and Ultraviolet. And James Ellroy? A very respected novelist making his screenwriting debut. (His works have spawned movies like L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia.) And weirdly enough, although Street Kings is very similiar in theme and content to Ayer's earlier works, he's not credited as a screenwriter. Just Ellroy and Wimmer.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty interesting, but that was before I spelled it all out in a large paragraph. Now I just realize it was a cheap way to kick off a review of a film I don't really have a whole lot to say about. As yet another tale of dirty criminals and even dirtier cops, Street Kings works well enough, albeit strictly in a "been there, seen that" sort of way. (Heck, if you've seen Training Day then you've already seen much of what this new film has to offer.) It's a well-constructed piece filled with colorful actors doing fine work -- but much of Street Kings offers that weird vibe that occurs when someone's in the middle of telling a joke you've already heard two or three times: The new presenter might be a fine joke-teller, but as a listener you're left with little response but to smile and nod politely.


Keanu Reeves plays a rogue cop who has no problem taking "justice" into his own hands. The film's early sequences, in which Reeves commits horribly brutal acts and does so in memorably matter-of-fact fashion, are some of the flick's best moments. But once we start meeting all the other cops (all mean, all dirty, all untrustworthy) and we realize that Street Kings has no "entry point" for the viewer, it just becomes a bunch of bad-ass posturing, a few kinetic shootouts, and a lot of hand-wringy moralizing that you've seen and heard before. (Mostly in Ayer's own movies.) There's not a character, idea or plot contortion that you won't see coming.

The story is so conventional that when a third-act revelation is finally acknowledged, I was stunned that it was supposed to be a plot twist. For a movie packed with supposedly street-smart "street kings," it sure has its characters do a lot of dumb things. The bulk of the story has to do with a dirty cop who is murdered just as he was about to testify against some other dirty cops, which leads Dirty Cop #1 (that'd be Keanu) to butt heads with Dirty Cops two through nine. And then at the big finale we're supposed to be stunned when yet another someone is proven a Dirty Cop. I'm all for moral ambiguity and all that jazz, but when everyone's a selfish killer ... where's the ambiguity?

When the movie's not trading in macho bravado or discussions about morality (or lack thereof), Ayer is able to construct a handful of suitably exciting shoot-outs. That's not to say that Street Kings is the action flick its marketers would have you believe, but the sophomore director does a fine job with his handful of manic moments. The whole of the cast is perfectly solid (most notably Forest Whitaker as "the captain" and an unexpectedly muscular Jay Mohr as, yep, a dirty cop), but much of their material feels like stuff left over from a random episode of CSI: Dirty Cop Division.

As for Mr. Reeves, he smartly underplays his role here, and the actor maintains an impressive air of "distance" from the violence he's creating. He doesn't play the role as a misunderstood saint, a moral crusader, or a quiet lunatic -- but as a smart and efficient "peace officer" who believes that his ends justify their means. (Also, Chris Evans does some good work as a young cop who ends up precisely as you think he will.)

It's as if someone thought that mixing the tasty moral issues of Training Day with a much more conventional action movie would make for a great flick. Unfortunately the weightier issues on display feel a bit overdone by now -- and the action stuff, while certainly passable, is certainly nothing all that memorable. As a comfortably familiar cable-flick matinee, Street Kings would work fine enough. But I'm thinking David Ayer has pretty much exhausted the "cops gone bad" concept by this point, and is simply treading over some very familiar ground here.