ALARM clock goes off. Load an automatic weapon, have a light vomit, and start looking for people to shoot. It’s how I start my day, and it works pretty well for Keanu Reeves as an LA cop in “Street Kings,” a wet, red chunk of pulp that knows what it is and doesn’t care.
In the hierarchy of the most brain-teasing crime puzzles ever devised by James Ellroy, who co-wrote the script, this one ranks somewhere below circle-a-word; your average coma patient or bath sponge will have figured out who’s behind the murder as soon as it happens. Thus Reeves is required to seem like the dumbest guy in the room. You could say he was born to play this role.
Still, at a Coney Island shooting gallery you know who did it, don’t you? Does that make it any less fun?
Like director David Ayer’s previous movies (he wrote “Training Day”), “Street Kings” is about the joy of badass coppery. This would include drinking both on the job and while driving, inappropriate community-outreach (Reeves’ Tom Ludlow addresses Korean folks as “zipperhead dog-munching dinks”) and Tom’s tendency to be discovered in rooms with lots of unmoving bodies containing his bullets.
To his boss (Forest Whitaker), Tom complains, “I got shot,” and the Whitaker character is embarrassed at this outburst of whining: “Yeah, but you OK?” Friends call Tom “LA’s deadliest white boy,” and in the LAPD they stitch that on your uniform and give you a raise.
Tom gets caught up in police corruption while trying to solve the bullet-aided demise of his ex-partner. His fellow cops promise to help make any potential charges go away, but who would trust these guys? Jay Mohr wears a mustache that itself looks like it served hard time for felonious bad taste, an inspector from Internal Affairs (Hugh Laurie of “House”) tries to trick Tom, and the officer assigned to investigate the murder that may or may not implicate Tom (Chris Evans of “Fantastic Four”) is called “Disco.”
Though we are informed that Tom is “a damn fine cop. He bleeds blue” – please, screenwriters, can we just once have a cop who bleeds some other color? Harvest orange, maybe, or a nice celadon? – I’m still not buying Keanu Reeves as a tough guy. His jerky movements are relatively under control here, but he still makes me wonder if he’s trying to work out a neck cramp. When he should be a rock of menace, like Charles Bronson, he instead calls to mind a bobblehead doll. It’s more fun watching Forest Whitaker – lately a cowering simp in “Vantage Point” and “The Great Debaters” – cut loose with lines like, “You want to talk? Let’s talk about my foot up you’re a – -!”
It’s almost as if these gentlemen are enjoying the hostility. After wandering into a den full of explosively armed drug dealers watching CNBC, blowing away a dozen or so heavy villains and nearly burying himself in a shallow grave, Tom has an answer for every situation – except a disapproving girlfriend who wants to know, “Why can’t you have a normal life like everyone else?” on the job and while driving, inappropriate community outreach (Reeves’ Tom Ludlow addresses Korean folks as “zipperhead dog-munching dinks”) and Tom’s tendency to be discovered in rooms with lots of unmoving bodies containing his bullets.
To his boss (Forest Whitaker), Tom complains, “I got shot,” and the Whitaker character is embarrassed at this outburst of whining: “Yeah, but you OK?” Friends call Tom “LA’s deadliest white boy,” and in the LAPD they stitch that on your uniform and give you a raise.
Tom gets caught up in police corruption while trying to solve the bullet-aided demise of his ex-partner. His fellow cops promise to help make any potential charges go away, but who would trust these guys? Jay Mohr wears a mustache that itself looks like it served hard time for felonious bad taste, an inspector from Internal Affairs (Hugh Laurie of “House”) tries to trick Tom, and the officer assigned to investigate the murder that may or may not implicate Tom (Chris Evans of “Fantastic Four”) is called “Disco.”
Though we are informed that Tom is “a damn fine cop. He bleeds blue” – please, screenwriters, can we just once have a cop who bleeds some other color? Harvest orange, maybe, or a nice celadon? – I’m still not buying Keanu Reeves as a tough guy. His jerky movements are relatively under control here, but he still makes me wonder if he’s trying to work out a neck cramp. When he should be a rock of menace, like Charles Bronson, he instead calls to mind a bobblehead doll. It’s more fun watching Whitaker – lately a cowering simp in “Vantage Point” and “The Great Debaters” – cut loose with lines like, “You want to talk? Let’s talk about my foot up your a – -!”
It’s almost as if these gentlemen are enjoying the hostility. After wandering into a den full of explosively temperamental drug dealers watching CNBC, blowing away some other heavy villains and nearly burying himself in a shallow grave, Tom proves he has an answer for every situation – except a disapproving girlfriend who wants to know, “Why can’t you have a normal life like everyone else?”