Photo by: Fox Searchlight
Contemporary police dramas generally have formulaic storylines. A renegade cop who plays by his own rules but he gets results, takes on drug dealers, corrupt cops and eventually overcomes incredible odds to be called a hero and have a medal pinned on his chest.
“Street Kings,” the latest from director David Ayer, is yet another manifestation of this same formula.
The story follows Detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) who work in Los Angeles. He is an alcoholic whose wife died recently. Soon Ludlow is flying in the face of standard police procedure, pumping hot lead into nefarious gangsters and rescuing children held hostage. Ludlow’s vice squad is led by Capt. Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker) makes sure the evidence shows that Ludlow is a hero. But there’s a catch. Not everyone buys into the deception.
And so Ludwig gets in trouble with LA’s Police Department’s James Biggs (Hugh Laurie) of Internal Affairs.
The story takes off from here, veering sharply from subplot to subplot as Ludlow grows a conscience.
If you have ever seen “LA Confidential” or any number of movies similarly plotted, then you should have no trouble identifying major plot twists long before they are on the screen. Groundbreaking: this movie is not.
The acting is actually decent, but that is not surprising, given that the cast features both Forest Whitaker and Hugh Laurie. Whitaker delivers the sort of performance expected of him since his Oscar win for “The Last King of Scotland,” though poorly written dialogue trips him up at times. Laurie, despite having an arguably one-dimensional character, does a fine job as well. Reeves grumbles and squints his way through his performance, though his character is supposed to be an alcoholic, so maybe that was on purpose. Regardless, the departure from his usual wooden, almost Zen-like delivery is a welcome change.
The only thing “Street Kings” really has going for it is the violent action. The shootouts are short, brutal, and quite satisfying. The violence is bloody without going over the top. The only real issue is that there should have been a bit more killing to break up the long stretches of tedium.
In the end, “Street Kings” stays true to its genre to a fault. It treads the same path dozens upon dozens of films have tread before. While the good cast and a few decent action sequences do keep it from falling into the B-movie category, it does not manage to distinguish itself as anything more than mediocre.
Cop movie junkies should find it worth their while, but others ought to think very carefully about whether or not it will be worth the ticket price.
Overall rating: 3 out of 5 Boones
