Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
4/17/08
A lot
of people, particularly filmmakers, have a thing against Stars. “How,”
they ask “can I believe I'm watching real people in a real story if I associate
the actors with other roles?” Myself, I can only summon one movie
(The Blair Witch Project) whose power in any way came from a sustained
illusion that I wasn't watching actors because, um, that's what a movie
is. And furthermore, 75% of what comes out of Hollywood NEEDS stars,
because if we were simply pointing a camera at real life people and letting
the events of their screenplays play out, we'd be inclined to think “Man,
I recognize a lot of this real life from movies I've seen...” Most
films are rituals of genre, and it helps when they're also rituals of Star
Power: not only do we benefit from the emotional memory of connecting
actors to other times when we enjoyed their work, but it's fun to see what
kind of new angles (even if they're only slightly new) they can find on
their established personas. All of which is my way of saying that
Street
Kings, the new Keanu Reeves vehicle co-written by novelist James Ellroy,
is an awfully familiar, leisurely paced tale of LAPD corruption rendered
at first watchable and finally engaging by the presence of a boatload of
familiar faces, including some of my favorites. I mean, come on,
who doesn't want to watch Dr. House as an Internal Affairs hotshot?
Anybody?
Rules
mean nothing to LAPD Detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves): he finds
the Bad Guys, and he takes care of them by any means necessary. He's
the prize pupil of Captain Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker), an ambitious
showman with his eyes on becoming the Chief... at least. Wander's
surrounded himself with a unit full of men willing to do anything on his
behalf, including Mike Clady (Jay Mohr), Cosmo Santos (Amaury Nolasco)
and Dante Demille (John Corbett). But one of his guys has had enough:
Tom's former partner Terrence Washington (Terry Crews). Washington's
gone to Internal Affairs and is talking to Captain Biggs (Hugh Laurie).
Wander tells Tom that he's the target of the investigation, and the Detective
goes off looking for Washington in hopes of beating him up. Instead,
the two of them end up in a convenience store shootout with two thugs,
one that proves fatal to the snitch and likely to end Tom's career:
after all, one of those bullets in the dead man's body is his. When
the investigation begins, it's nothing but a cover-up, with young Detective
Paul Diskant (Chris Evans) assigned to make sure the case just goes away.
But while Tom may be something of a lunatic, he does believe in justice,
and persuades Diskant to join him in hunting down those two masked gunmen.
The search will lead him very close to home.
I couldn't
help but wonder while watching Street Kings why the cinematic NYPD
is a noble band of brothers tainted by the occasional bad apple while their
LAPD counterparts come in only three varieties: corrupt to the core,
homicidally crazed Angel of Vengeance or too young to know better.
Whatever the reason, familiarity is Street Kings' co-pilot.
Director David Ayers wrote two similar movies himself: the Kurt Russell
vehicle Dark Blue and Denzel Washington's Training Day.
But if no new ground is trodden here, at least the screenplay by L.A.
Confidential novelist James Ellroy, Equillibrium director Kurt
Wimmer and newcomer Jamie Moss does an efficient job of covering the familiar
turf and then counts on a cast with at least a dozen familiar faces to
bring it home.
Reeves
still carries the reputation as a bad actor, but he's come so far since
the days of Bram Stoker's Dracula and Chain Reaction:
at this point, he's a decade removed from his last poor performance.
Grief, misery and regret are his best notes, and Tom Ludlow has all three
in abundance, while Reeves' innate quiet decency keeps the character likable
no matter how many people he kills. Whitaker plays to the back row,
the perfect way to go as a cop who's really a politician: always
working the angles, always improvising his devious plans on the fly.
His final scene is a show-stopper. I'm a huge House fan, so
I have to say it was delightful to see Laurie give basically the same performance
for the opposite team: House fights The Man, but Biggs IS The Man.
Evans has all the tools to be a real movie star, he just hasn't caught
the break yet. And the rest of the cast is packed with good actors
with one or two showcase moments and a whole lot of evil. Cedric
The Entertainer gets a surprisingly raw dramatic moment late in the game,
while The Game and Common both deliver scary authenticity in small roles
(and yes, though they're prominent in the ads, the roles are tiny).
Although
the story is familiar, the filmmakers do have at least one surprise up
their sleeves, and even before they play that wild card, Street Kings
has built up a pretty good head of steam by the end. But it's ultimately
the kind of movie studio marketing departments must love: look at
the names on the poster and see if any of them strike your fancy.
Me, I like Keanu Reeves, Forest Whittaker and Hugh Laurie, and I liked
Street
Kings. Case closed. |
