Friday, April 11, 2008

Movie review: Street Kings

Phone Book Tom's gonna need more vodka.

By John P. Meyer

Street Kings

Tom Ludlow, a veteran LAPD Vice Detective, sets out on a quest to discover the killers of his former partner, Detective Terrance Washington. Captain Wander's, Ludlow's supervisor, duties include keeping him within the confines of the law--and out of the clutches of Internal Affairs Captain Biggs. Ludlow teams up with a young Robbery Homicide Detective to track Washington's killers through the diverse communities of Los Angeles. Their determination pays off when the two detectives track down Washington's murderers and confront them in an attempt to bring them to justice.

Source: Cinema Source

• Showtimes and more on Street Kings

Previous James Ellroy screen adaptations have been lushly atmospheric, set nostalgically in a Los Angeles of bygone days (L.A. Confidential; The Black Dahlia). In Street Kings scripter Ellroy teams with director David Ayer (Training Day, Harsh Times) to produce an adrenaline-laced modern-day cop story set amidst the grim and violent reality of a city where angels fear to tread.

Detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) has one constant companion: his trusty long slide custom Colt .45 auto. He wakes up with it; he goes to bed with it; he disassembles and cleans it with paternal loving care; and woe betide he who crosses sidearms with Phone Book Tom while his companion is close at hand. (Phone Book who? Stay tuned...)

Oh - and there's one other familiar essential in Tom's life: vodka, dispensed from those little airline-sized bottles that he picks up three at a time from a local liquor store.

Detective Tom Ludlow in his element

We soon come to see why the good detective needs such a substantive crutch: as Special Vice unit leader Captain Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker) puts it, Tom is his team's "point of the spear," and Wander's not averse to thrusting his point man into the kinds of extra-legal special ops that amount to wholesale premeditated murder.

Leading up to the first head-ducking shootout of the film, Tom sells a machine gun (and I mean a machine gun, not one of those sissy little sub-guns) to a pair of oriental bangers in order to finagle his way into their hidden lair. After demonstrating that he knows how to take a lickin' and keep on tickin', Tom commences doing what he does best - which is to dish out lead in copper-jacketed 230-grain servings.

While he is wearing a vest, Tom nevertheless picks up a few pellets of buckshot which earn him a trip to the hospital while Captain Wander holds off the crime scene investigators. Conveniently, Tom's girlfriend Grace (smokin' hot newcomer Martha Higareda) is an emergency room nurse, so they end up seeing a lot of each other regardless of whether he asks her out to dinner.

House with a sidearm? Man, that's scary!

Back at the office, Tom proves he has the IA drill down pat, seeming to pull his responses from a pre-written (and carefully rehearsed) script.

But all's far from hunky-dory, because Tom's old patrol partner Terrence Washington (former NFL'er Terry Crews) has gone all strict interpretationist and has been spending quality time with Captain Biggs (Hugh Laurie, still without any trace of a Brit accent), who heads up Internal Affairs, to prove it. He's coming clean, which threatens to leave Detective Tom holding the dirty laundry. Or maybe wearing it.

How fortuitously coincidental, then, when Washington is riddled with gang banger bullets during a convenience store robbery and removed from the playing field. It's almost as if someone up there's looking out for Tom. But that someone may not be as far up there it appears...

After serving a lay-low-until-things-blow-over stint behind a desk in - ironically - the citizen complaint office (an LAPD officer's version of Purgatory), Tom loads up again on his own initiative and sets out to find his ex-partner's killers. Every closet he pries open contains skeletons, and most of them come out shooting.

"So, how are you with flesh wounds?"

Teaming up with a rookie detective who goes by the name Disco (Chris Evans), Tom dives head-first into the deep end of the criminal subculture pool, encountering along the way a number of salty characters portrayed in the film by real-life rap artists and/or former gang bangers (Common, The Game, Cle Shaheed Sloan). Even Cedric the Entertainer gets a role as a stylin', Caddy-drivin' dealer called Scribble, and does a good job of chewing up the scenery - until he ends up in the middle ground of a crossfire, that is.

It's during this underground investigative segment that we find out how Phone Book Tom got his nickname - and it involves interrogation techniques of which even our current administration would disapprove. (Wouldn't they?)

Director Ayer successfully reasserts the sense of knife-edge desperation he established so well in Harsh Times, leaving us little time to ponder the enormous plot holes embedded in the script; as long as we're ducking bullets or dodging baby carriages in the crosswalks during a high-speed chase, it's tough to focus on logic. The performances by the lead players (Mr. Whitaker, Mr. Laurie and - yes - even Keanu Reeves) are gritty and sneering and laden with enough testosterone to fuel a cross-border invasion.

Nice symbolic touch: the dead shark floating in the aquarium during the climactic encounter with Detective Washington's killers.

BY PRESCRIPTION ONLY: "Do the department a favor: wash your mouth out with buckshot." - Wander to Biggs

INTERROGATION FAUX PAS?: "Aren't you supposed to ask me something first?" - thug receiving the phone book treatment

THOSE WERE THE DAYS: "What happened to just locking up bad people?" - Tom to Wander

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• Arts > Movies / Film > Mainstream Movies