Cops Gone Wild
Street Kings
The New York Sun, April, 11, 2008
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night," George Orwell once wrote, "only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
That society sanctions the use of force to protect itself is neither surprising nor controversial. What we debate instead is how rough those men can be and how, exactly, they can be controlled. We live, so the story goes, in a nation of laws, but we also seem to accept, if quietly, that some laws will occasionally have to be broken if others — the laws we really care about — are to be enforced. When that rough Dirty Harry went a little too far, nobody, other than unlucky punks, persnickety lawyers, and senior policemen, seemed to mind too much. Nor, over the course of five movies, did his audience.
Sometimes, of course, a rogue cop is just a rogue cop. The difficulty of distinguishing between good policemen and bad is, I suppose, the theme trying to survive the splattering gore, rampaging clichés, and flying bullets that otherwise define the noisy, nasty, but sporadically watchable "Street Kings," by the sophomore director David Ayer (who made his debut in 2005 with the oppressive and pretentious "Harsh Times").
Mr. Ayer has explored the world of the police before, but he did so as a screenwriter on the excellent "Training Day," the appalling "Dark Blue," and the idiotic "S.W.A.T." On this occasion, the screenwriting credits are divided among, encouragingly, the author James Ellroy (who also wrote the original story), ominously, Kurt Wimmer (a writer-director best known for two pieces of dreary sci-fi sludge, "Ultraviolet" and "Equilibrium"), and, mysteriously, Jamie Moss (who is, apparently, now slated to work on an upcoming manga epic).
Whatever the hopes and fears stirred by the thought of Messrs. Ellroy, Wimmer, and Moss, "Street Kings" remains a distinctive Ayer production, starting with its location. As he seemingly rarely misses an opportunity to mention, Mr. Ayer spent part of his teens in South Central Los Angeles, and it is becoming to him what the Upper East Side has been to Woody Allen — trademark, canvas, and, if he's not careful, dead end. "Street Kings" features the usual menacing streetscapes of a gang-ruled Los Angeles, the usual elite unit-turned-rancid, the usual stash of concealed dollars, the usual banality masquerading as profundity, and the usual pantomime machismo. The film is too one-dimensional to be noir: Any ambiguities are illusory, all conundrums easy to decipher, and the view taken of the police is too predictably jaundiced to be of any real interest.
That said, "Street Kings" is partly redeemed by the performances of those few members of the cast allowed to develop their roles beyond stereotype, notably Forest Whitaker as the manipulative, clever captain in charge of Ad Vice, this particular film's rogue unit. His Captain Wander is an officer who appears to barely remember why he joined the force in the first place. He may still cling to some notions of frontier justice or, at least, frontier rationalizations ("At the end of the day it's order that counts. Why sweat the details? Gotta break some eggs to make an omelet"), but for the most part, Wander's preoccupations are power and control; even the money he has accumulated is just a means to those ends.
Cool, self-possessed, and restrained, his lazy eye only serving to emphasize his vigilant, calculating authority, Mr. Whitaker is all too believable as a leader able to forge a fierce loyalty among his men — a loyalty that has transformed them into something between a cult and a tribe, a brotherhood that sets its own rules.
As weary viewers of Mr. Ayer's early films will know, male bonding is part of the shtick, along with sporadic suggestions that the police themselves are, in a sense, just another gang (something in this case also implied by the title). In this movie, though, these ideas are handled more subtly than usual, and from time to time, they even persuade. Thus we note that there's nothing distinctively LAPD about Ad Vice's style. Neatly groomed and smartly dressed, they look like the ambitious middle management (check out Jay Mohr's performance) of a successful corporation, albeit one that's gone feral. The winning's the thing. The group's the thing.
But it's a group that's under suspicion. Internal Affairs, in the form of Hugh Laurie's insinuating, tricky, and nicely observed Captain Biggs, is circling. Biggs realizes that a shooting witnessed by Ad Vice's Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) may present an opportunity to break the unit open. The embattled Ludlow may be the roughest of the rough ("the tip of the f---ing spear"), but he is crumbling. His wife is dead, he's drinking too much, he may be the target of a frame-up, and, most discouraging of all, he's played by Mr. Reeves, the king of coma. Referred to at one point as a "guided missile," Mr. Reeves's Ludlow is better described as a piece of wood. The movie is meant to revolve around Ludlow's struggle to do the right thing (he's basically one of the good guys), but with a near-catatonic Keanu in the role, it's difficult either to care or, indeed, to notice.
Yes, "Street Kings" has its moments, but on the whole, it's better to move along: There's nothing (much) to see here.