Two stars (out of five). Rating: R, for pervasive violence and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.11.08
Buy DVD: Street Kings
• Buy Blu-Ray: Street Kings (+ Digital Copy) [Blu-ray]
Street Kings is a movie for folks who thought the characters in 2001's Training Day
were too genteel.  |
| Santos (Amaury Nolasco, left) and Demille (John Corbett, right) are visibly disappointed that their partner, Ludlow (Keanu Reeves), has left them nobody to kill, in a typical scene from this tawdry cop flick. And let us remember: These are the good guys. Don't you feel safer? |
If Joseph Wambaugh has devoted his career to exploring the psyches of flawed but noble police officers, James Ellroy has been much more intrigued by the unredeemable corruption of those granted the privileges that come with a badge. Both novelists wonder whether inherently decent men can survive a polluted system with their integrity intact: Wambaugh generally holds out hope, whereas Ellroy obviously has none whatsoever.
Factor in a director — David Ayer — who views South Central Los Angeles as a war zone, and the result is quite bleak and distasteful.
But even that would be tolerable, if Ayer were willing to explore the topic with any degree of credibility. Alas, Street Kings isn't drama; it's overwrought burlesque, littered with giggling psychopaths on both sides of the equation. These characters shoot first and don't bother with the questions.
We got a taste of the Ayer/ Ellroy mentality with 2002's Dark Blue
, an equally ludicrous tale of bent cops gone from bad to worse. Apparently determined to sully the LAPD badge even further, we're once again thrown onto these mean streets, expected (as viewers) to buy into macho nonsense where vile cops are so far gone that they don't even watch out for each other. On top of which, Ayer is a lousy director. His film has no sense of time and place; the action within this story might be unfolding within hours, days or even weeks. He extracts truly dreadful and overwrought performances from just about everybody in the cast; every line of hard-bitten dialogue emerges from teeth so firmly clenched that the actors must worry about long-term lockjaw.
Indeed, Ayer manages the impossible: He makes Forest Whitaker look and sound like a bad actor.
Goodness, Whitaker even managed to escape from Vantage Point
with his integrity intact, and that film's also a mess. Here, though, his line readings are shrill and hysterical, his eyes literally popping out of his skull; he looks for all the world like a junkie in desperate need of his next fix. And we're supposed to accept Whitaker as a police captain on the rise, with visions of being anointed LAPD's master chief?
Puh-leaze.
