RojoStreet Kings - review
D. David Ayer. W. James Ellroy, Kurt Wimmer. Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker, Huge Laurie, Chris Evens, Cedric the Entertainer, Jay Moyer, Common, The Game.
I like David Ayer’s writing. Dark Blue, Training Day, Harsh Times. His fascination with the gritty side of LA crime and cops who operate in this word is beginning to take on an almost aurtor appearance.
Street Kings is a movie I was surprised he didn’t write as it felt like his work. However it was writer James Ellroy and Kurt Wimmer who scripted this. Ellroy no stranger to crime has a fascination with the criminal and it seems with the cops who track them. The moral issue cops face with either being a little dirty to do a lot of cleaning or to be all dirty or all clean. Cops that are ‘gunfighters’ a subject of a speech from Dark Blue by Kurt Russell and also in Street Kings Reeves asking Evan’s (Diskant) if he feels he’s up to the task of the gunfighter. One can easily infer that Ellroy never got over the murder of his mother and the fact that the crime went unsolved due to his penchant for cops that are at the core clean but have no problem using dirty tactic to achieve their results (maybe he feels that if the police bust a few more heads his mothers killer may not have slipped by). This is echoed with Reeves in the first shoot out scene of Street Kings when after the fighting has ceased Reeves (Ludlow) prowls the scene and fills in the blanks to make ‘his’ account of the events. Due to the fact that dead men often find it hard to articulate their account of events the cops will always prevail.
On the whole the story is prosaic. Dirty cops clean cops and those in between. One man fighting the system that use to embrace him, and in doing so uncovering a morass of scandal that makes Monica Lewinski’s kneeling act look like a girl scout tap dance in the oval office.
Though this par tale there are redeeming factors, Huge Laurie is one. I love Laurie always have. As a kid I watched ‘A Bit of Fry and Laurie’ and ‘Blackadder’. I loved his one book ‘The Gun Seller’, and now as the limping solipsist Dr House he deserves his success. So good to see he’s fully cracked America and moved on from baby oil adverts and Stuart Little.
Laurie plays an almost I.A cop, he is trying to track down corruption but plays his cards close to his chest on doing so. Believing Ludlow to being the key to his investigation he pops up just enough to press the point of his existence in this film.
Forest Whitaker is a good actor and plays his part well. There isn’t much licence for anything amazing to come from him but he holds up his end of this film as you would expect him to.
Reeves is Reeves. Monotone, wooden, passable, I don’t know what it is about him that allows him to get away with being so flat in pretty much everything I’ve seen of his but he gets away with it, and films still headline him so I guess many others out there think him good.
Prior to watching Street Kings I had been watching the first season of ‘The Shield’, which I enjoyed. Street Kings felt like a cleaner, shot on film version of The Shield. References to the ‘farm’ and the ‘barn’, the same type of dirty cop’s etc, paint the boarders of a theory I had which may have had or agree with. Shawn Ryan was inspired from Training Day and Dark Blue. This collection of films (Dark Blue, Training Day, Street Kings, and Harsh Times) seem to be part of the make up of the shield be it in sprit, but there is definitely a connection of some kind.
Entertaining crime flick.
6.5/10
