Street Kings is a throwback to the glory days of police movies of the late 80s and the early 90s when no action was too violent, no set piece was too improbable and no villain was too over the top. Add to the formula an assortment of cops doing bad things as a means of lending an air of mock-credibility and seriousness to the proceedings and you have a potential winner. There is even more going for Street Kings: donning the director’s hat is genre champion David Ayer whose Training Day even took him to the Oscars; sharing writing credits is none other than James Ellroy, the undisputed master of the meanest LA police realpolitik. The names of these two no doubt have played a big part in attracting and assembling a truly stellar cast, only for it to become the part of the movie’s resounding undoing.
In the grizzled-yet-chic milieu of hard-as-nails cops dealing in various shades of corrupt compromises, the plot chooses to focus on the one played by Keanu Reeves. He is a demon-angel of a cop named Tom Ludlow who is a weary expert of shooting first and planting evidence later and who is dispatched where his department needs the laws stealthily bent, broken or otherwise. He is generally a guy you don’t want to be messing with. He is tough, sinister, assertive, projecting an aura of disquieting authority and making guilty ones run for cover just by looking at them. All attributes you hardly associate with Reeves. His perpetually bewildered robotic features and very un-actorish boyish voice might have served him well 17 years ago as the rookie FBI agent in Point Break – his first encounter with the genre – but here his attempts at keeping his voice as low and weary as possible are off-putting, to put it mildly.
On top of trying to play a legitimate tough guy, which is an impossible stretch for him, Reeves has to add an identity crisis, vengeful bouts of guilty conscience and wounded surprise at a startling discovery. All of these would have been meet-and-potatoes for someone like Russell Crowe (remember him in L.A. Confidential?), but Reeves’ crack at them takes his performance beyond salvation along with the entire movie. Ludlow’s drama comes about as his partner Terrence Washington (Terry Crews) is seemingly accidentally shot dead during a convenience store robbery. Ludlow also happens to be there wanting to beat Washington senseless because the latter plans to tell everything about their departments misdemeanors to Internal Affairs. Ludlow’s superior Jack Wander (Forrest Whitaker) is quick to hush things up and protect his protege, much to the displeasure of Internal Affairs’ boss James Biggs (Hugh Laurie). Ludlow is shocked to the bone, wants to avenge his partner and kill the culprits, and his independent investigation leads him to revelations which are startling to him, but not to anyone in the audience.
The fact that the plotting telegraphs its surprises does not help the film’s cause, nor does the fact that Forrest Whitaker goes way over the top, nor does Hugh Laurie’s decision not to stray too far from the way he plays Dr House on TV, nor do the scarce appearances of female characters charged with dispensing fortune-cookie wisdom (“be true to yourself,” “find the goodness in your heart,” etc). The one redeeming feature of the movie comes in the last two minutes; they offer a denouement which is so subversively unexpected and at odds with everything before it that for a fleeting moment you’re likely to forget the movie’s catalogue of shortcomings.
