Street Kings is a thoroughly by-the-numbers urban thriller about corrupt cops on the mean streets of modern-day Los Angeles: the kind of thing which, if James Ellroy's name wasn't actually in the credits, one might dismiss as a half-baked retread of Ellroyesque ideas.
   It would be fascinating to know just how much of Ellroy's script - apparently the first he's written directly for the screen - survives into the finished movie, and how much is the responsibility of Kurt (The Recruit) Wimmer and Jamie (no screenplays previously produced) Moss, each of whom seem to have had separate cracks at it (early announcements suggested John Ridley, credited as the film's producer, also had a hand in the script's early development.)
   What we're left with very much looks a promising picture which has been spoiled by rewrites presumably intended to "fix" (or, more likely, to make mainstream-palatable) what was "wrong" with Ellroy's original conception (which he titled The Night Watchman, and which will likely pop up at some stage on the internet and/or in a compendium of Ellroy ephemera.)
   With his model-impassive looks and stylish coif, Keanu Reeves is odd casting in the central role of Tom Ludlow, a maverick, long-serving "peace-officer" whose trademark "interrogation" tool is the hefty local telephone-directory. His methods may be unorthodox, and he may be addicted to "airline-sized" vodka miniatures (alcoholism explained by demise of wife), but he's a plaster saint compared with most of his colleagues - who are on the take, on the make, or much worse.
   The only "clean" face on view is that of straight-arrow Internal-Affairs operative Diskind (an unflatteringly buzzcut Chris Evans) who is tasked to investigate Ludlow's propriety after the suspicious death of the latter's former colleague, soon realising that Ludlow is more victim than potential culprit. 
   This being such a thuddingly predictable affair from beginning to end, Diskind is, of course hopelessly doomed the minute it's revealed that he's engaged to be married. Reeves and company (including a notably slimline Forrest Whitaker as his bombastically blustering superior) go through the rote motions with a dogged persistence, while director Ayer tries to jazz up the hackneyed material with intrusive scoring and various stylistic borrowings from Michael Mann and David Fincher - the latter (like Spike Lee and Oliver Stone) having been lined up to direct this project at one stage.
   It's mildly diverting to ponder what Fincher et al might have made of Street Kings - and we have plenty of time to dwell on such issues in between the picture's sparsely-scattered action set-pieces. On the plus side, vivid supporting turns from rapper 'The Game' (drawling snitch) and Hugh Laurie (snarky IA bigwig) help to pass the time, but their merits only point out the deficiencies prevalent elsewhere.
   Ellroy has gotten away with returning again and again to the theme of LA cop-corruption because (a) he invariably manages to come up with fresh psychological, topical and historical angles and (b) he's a dazzlingly effective prose-stylist. In the case of Ayer, however, who has been mining a similar seam for several years (via his scripts for the likes of Training Day), in a similarly obsessive fashion, the law of diminishing returns is evidently unbendable. 
   This latest variation on his pet themes is a cut or two below his last collaboration with the novelist, Ron Shelton's unfairly-overlooked, 1992-set Dark Blue (2002) - not least because Kurt Russell made for a rather more convincing hardbitten/crazy-veteran antihero protagonist. As boys-in-blue dramas go, then, Street Kings is better than some - but really isn't, in the final analysis, very much cop.

Neil Young
23.Apr.08

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USA
109m (BBFC timing)

director: David Ayer (Harsh Times.)
editor: Jeffrey Ford (Breach, The Family Stone, Hide and Seek, etc)

seen 20.Apr.08 Boldon (CineWorld: £6.40)