A story's characters must have certain qualities, and something in their life caused them to have them. Even if we never, ever see the causal scenes, the writer must know that those causal scenes happened. The characters in Street Kings have qualities caused by lives of watching cop movies from the 1990s. I enjoyed this movie. It was not the trashy cash-in action movie one could easily presume it to be.
Keanu Reeves plays Tom Ludlow, a disheartened L.A. Police Officer Who Doesn't Play By The Rules, and is Haunted By The Death Of His Wife. All of the cops in Ludlow's unit, including their captain, Forest Whitaker, twist, manipulate and at times totally shatter the rules of conduct habitually. Their intent is, time and again anyway, to take care of crime in an approach that they see as more effective, which finds them more often than not lying, fabricating reports and stage-managing evidence to cover their tracks.
The movie opens with Reeves, Waking Up With A Hangover. Working undercover, he meets with two Korean gangsters in a parking lot, who are looking to buy a machine gun from him. After a brutal beating, they steal his car. Tracing his car to the Korean's hideaway, Tom breaks in and kills everybody, and then finds two missing schoolgirls who were the reason for his pursuit of these guys in the first place. He then moves on to cover up what really happened. While the other officers in his unit applaud him, he is challenged by his ex- partner, Washington, who no longer accepts the corruption and fraud and has returned to a law-abiding status as a cop, reporting the issues to Internal Affairs Captain Hugh Laurie, who starts an investigation against Reeves while at the same time proving once again that British actors playing Americans are so seamless and impeccable at it that vice versa doesn't compare.
Perhaps Reeves belongs in this sort of film. It would be insulting to deny that he is above Bill and Ted, but he has yet to show strength in a sophisticated dramatic role. He is not a bad actor. He simply belongs to a certain age group. He plays embodiments of what most young guys envision themselves to potentially be, were they protagonists in action films. Street Kings, though it is no Speed nor Matrix, is no exception. He gives his character bitterness and stiffness. Perhaps the film's strongest performance is by Whitaker. In a film full of prospectively compelling characters, he reaches full potential with the written part.
A great deal of this movie's charm is its attention-grabbing assembly of actors. Chris Evans, one of our newest pretty boys whose chops as an actor have had to wait awhile to truly show themselves, plays a young rookie detective with the predictable outcome. Stand-up comic Cedric the Entertainer is an unlikely and very persuasive choice in the role of a forlorn drug dealer used by Reeves and Evans as an informant. I was particularly surprised by the chilling performances by an actor named Cle Sloan and rapper Common as Fremont and Coates, or perhaps two criminals masquerading as Fremont and Coates, a question that in itself poses a relevant moral symbolism for the effect the undercover police work has on the film's cops.
Who isn't entertained by Jay Mohr being thrown in the trunk of a car, but by now I'm thinking that there is that familiar action movie tradition, the abundance of sausage. Where are the female characters? I am careful not to say, Where are the women? Because of course there are women, but it seems the only woman in the film is Naomie Harris, the entirely scripted and trite Voice of Reason, who of course is later in peril. Duh!
Street Kings is overall pure, laid-back entertainment. It is violent, vindicating as such, ripe with an interesting cast and not infected with the flashiness that most crime films with rappers as actors suffer. David Ayer is respected and deservedly so for his insight into the inner workings of police, in particular the LAPD, with such scripts as Antoine Fuqua's powerful Training Day, the watered-down cornball walk in the park S.W.A.T. and his directorial debut Harsh Times, perhaps the most interesting of all his concepts. Frankly, screenwriter James Ellroy, the mind behind the ageless L.A. Confidential, is an ear-perking name in the crime genre as well, having written Street Kings years ago, inspired by the O.J. Simpson trial. Unfortunately, Ayer's sophomore effort at the helm falls prey to the other extreme, which is that there is not a lot of energy here. It is purely standard fare, technically well made but without the sparks which would make it memorable.
Keanu Reeves plays Tom Ludlow, a disheartened L.A. Police Officer Who Doesn't Play By The Rules, and is Haunted By The Death Of His Wife. All of the cops in Ludlow's unit, including their captain, Forest Whitaker, twist, manipulate and at times totally shatter the rules of conduct habitually. Their intent is, time and again anyway, to take care of crime in an approach that they see as more effective, which finds them more often than not lying, fabricating reports and stage-managing evidence to cover their tracks.
The movie opens with Reeves, Waking Up With A Hangover. Working undercover, he meets with two Korean gangsters in a parking lot, who are looking to buy a machine gun from him. After a brutal beating, they steal his car. Tracing his car to the Korean's hideaway, Tom breaks in and kills everybody, and then finds two missing schoolgirls who were the reason for his pursuit of these guys in the first place. He then moves on to cover up what really happened. While the other officers in his unit applaud him, he is challenged by his ex- partner, Washington, who no longer accepts the corruption and fraud and has returned to a law-abiding status as a cop, reporting the issues to Internal Affairs Captain Hugh Laurie, who starts an investigation against Reeves while at the same time proving once again that British actors playing Americans are so seamless and impeccable at it that vice versa doesn't compare.
Perhaps Reeves belongs in this sort of film. It would be insulting to deny that he is above Bill and Ted, but he has yet to show strength in a sophisticated dramatic role. He is not a bad actor. He simply belongs to a certain age group. He plays embodiments of what most young guys envision themselves to potentially be, were they protagonists in action films. Street Kings, though it is no Speed nor Matrix, is no exception. He gives his character bitterness and stiffness. Perhaps the film's strongest performance is by Whitaker. In a film full of prospectively compelling characters, he reaches full potential with the written part.
A great deal of this movie's charm is its attention-grabbing assembly of actors. Chris Evans, one of our newest pretty boys whose chops as an actor have had to wait awhile to truly show themselves, plays a young rookie detective with the predictable outcome. Stand-up comic Cedric the Entertainer is an unlikely and very persuasive choice in the role of a forlorn drug dealer used by Reeves and Evans as an informant. I was particularly surprised by the chilling performances by an actor named Cle Sloan and rapper Common as Fremont and Coates, or perhaps two criminals masquerading as Fremont and Coates, a question that in itself poses a relevant moral symbolism for the effect the undercover police work has on the film's cops.
Who isn't entertained by Jay Mohr being thrown in the trunk of a car, but by now I'm thinking that there is that familiar action movie tradition, the abundance of sausage. Where are the female characters? I am careful not to say, Where are the women? Because of course there are women, but it seems the only woman in the film is Naomie Harris, the entirely scripted and trite Voice of Reason, who of course is later in peril. Duh!
Street Kings is overall pure, laid-back entertainment. It is violent, vindicating as such, ripe with an interesting cast and not infected with the flashiness that most crime films with rappers as actors suffer. David Ayer is respected and deservedly so for his insight into the inner workings of police, in particular the LAPD, with such scripts as Antoine Fuqua's powerful Training Day, the watered-down cornball walk in the park S.W.A.T. and his directorial debut Harsh Times, perhaps the most interesting of all his concepts. Frankly, screenwriter James Ellroy, the mind behind the ageless L.A. Confidential, is an ear-perking name in the crime genre as well, having written Street Kings years ago, inspired by the O.J. Simpson trial. Unfortunately, Ayer's sophomore effort at the helm falls prey to the other extreme, which is that there is not a lot of energy here. It is purely standard fare, technically well made but without the sparks which would make it memorable.