Nothing better to do on a Wednesday night. Go to the pictures. New movie. Street Kings. Script part-written by James Ellroy. Like him: crime writer. Hard-boiled. Sparse. Also written by Kurt Wimmer. Guy made Equilibrium. Suggests there wasn’t a lot of that in the writing process. Ellroy leaves treatment unguarded. Gets out the shower. Broken glass. Window shattered. Script gone. ‘Damn you Wimmer!’
Keanu wakes up. Keanu plays Tom. Tom’s a cop: LAPD. Tom’s violent. Tom’s a widower. Tom throws people in the trunk of his car. Tom’s like Jack Traven all growed up and gone to the drink. Or John Constantine, beating on ethnic minorities instead of demons. Either way: derivative.
Close-knit ‘special vice’ unit. Led by Forest Whitaker. Memories of The Shield. Who else in the cast? Jay Mohr. Okay. Cedric the Entertainer. Funny, not ha-ha. Hugh Laurie. Bizarre. John Corbett. John Corbett!?
Well-worn trajectory. Tom gets in trouble with IAD. Tom gets set-up. For a cop, Tom sure misses the obvious. Clearly never read an Ellroy book. Hooks up with a friendly detective outside his unit: Diskant. They investigate shit. They kill people. They have racially charged interactions with the Latino community. They bond. Homoerotic subplot weighs heavy.
The guys who did it aren’t the real bastards at all. The rot goes deep. The rot goes up. The rot goes all the way to city hall (implicitly). Oedipal issues. Violence solves everything. What did he just do with that spade? Baddies can’t just be corrupt: have to be rapists too. Women exist to be submitted to and/or saved. That guy is still in the trunk – have they forgotten?
Shot hand-held. Shot on 16mm. Should have cost less: the grit’s too polished. Conceptually shocking ending forced safe. Forced nice. Disturbing to watch if unironic.
Los Angeles is a character in this film. Not saying much. City gets hotter every year. Not cold enough for Ellroy. Room temperature drama. Chris Evans nails it as an honest cop. The others flounder. Redundant scenes alternate with incident-heavy nonsense. Needs to be forty-five minutes longer and a lifetime smarter.
That guy’s never getting out of the trunk.
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