There are no saints in Street Kings, only those who have been morally compromised less and have been lucky enough to dodge more bullets. An unapologetically bare cop movie, Street Kings doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel so much as it attempts to demonstrate how the wheel is broken.

Drugs, guns and money make the world go ‘round in this film about a Los Angeles vice squad officer who has lost his bearings on which crooked cops he can trust. After cracking a case of abduction and kiddie prostitution by any means necessary, Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) learns that he has unwittingly caught the attention of the head of Internal Affairs (Hugh Laurie).

Tom’s captain (Forest Whitaker) has gone 12 rounds with Internal Affairs before, but soon enough doubt begins to set in for us – if not for Frank – as to whose side he’s playing on and who’s playing on his.

It must be hard to sit down and write a movie about crooked cops. It’s been done so often and many times so well that finding a new way in has to be difficult. Of course, if you’re James Ellroy, you don’t even worry about that. Ellroy wrote the novel L.A. Confidential (crooked cops in the LAPD) and the original story that became the underrated Dark Blue (crooked cops in the LAPD), as well as the novel Black Dahlia (dead harlot…and crooked cops in the LAPD).

He does manage to give these characters fantastic coptalk throughout the film, and they rattle off things like gun calibers and procedural abbreviations like there’s no tomorrow. So while we’ve seen a lot of this before, the names have been changed and the dialogue really pops.

Director David Ayer has been down the road with a gritty L.A. cop movie before; Harsh Times, released in 2006, is notable for sporting one of the worst Christian Bale performances imaginable, but not for very much else. Street Kings is much more accomplished. For starters, he has a vibrant script, if not a superb one, and the ensemble fills out nicely, with good supporting performances by Common, Jay Mohr, Chris Evans and John Corbett.

It’s also another solid choice for Keanu Reeves, who, let’s face it, is not a very good actor. But he has maneuvered very well in his career to land in films like The Matrix, Constantine, A Scanner Darkly, and Street Kings, which is at least a new character to embody with so little charisma. But Reeves has more intensity and tenacity in Street Kings than we’re used to. You can buy him as a dirty cop.

Or is he one of the clean ones?

Street Kings

Starring Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker, Chris Evans and Hugh Laurie

Directed by David Ayer

Rated R

Review by Colin Boyd

April 11, 2008