Beat Street

Street Kings is far from kingly.

by Drew Lazor

The first two things LAPD detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) does when he gets up in the morning are puke and clean his sidearm. Then he stops to pick up mini-bar bottles of vodka — easy to slug back while driving. From there, it's off to a poorly lit parking lot for an undercover arms deal, during which he lets two Korean bangers beat the piss out of him and steal his car so he can track it back to their hideout.

Without identifying himself as police, Ludlow bursts in and kills the whole gang on his own. Then he pulls back a door to reveal the motivation behind his seemingly blind rampage — the rich twin girls the thugs have kidnapped, stuffed into a cage but alive.

Unit commander Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker) is the first to pat him on the back. Ludlow's been doing this for a while — the ease with which he twists circumstances in his post-slaughter debriefing proves it. "You went toe to toe with evil," Warder insists, trying, but not too hard, to inject pride into someone who's become numb to his only function. "And you won!"

But winning's not the issue. If anything, Ludlow, who just hasn't given a shit since his wife died, loses it a little more every time he breaks the rules to complete tasks his shifty-yet-paternal CO labels noble. But then again, this is L.A., right?

Street Kings is Training Day scribe David Ayer's latest foray into Los Angeles grit. His first stab behind the camera was 2005's Harsh Times, and there are more than a few thematic similarities between the two films — namely, protagonists who can't be held responsible for their own flaws.

Already under the microscope of Internal Affairs' Captain James Biggs (Hugh Laurie, doing House sans limp), Ludlow garners further suspicion by being on the scene when his estranged former partner Washington (Terry Crews) is murdered. Ludlow vows to track down the assailants, enlisting fresh-faced Diskant (Chris Evans) to help. But what doesn't make much sense in James Ellroy's story — the reason Ludlow was following Washington in the first place was to beat his ass for snitching to IA. Dude couldn't care less about wasting dozens of hoodlums, but the second a guy who he thinks is trying to screw him dies, he's Captain Vengeance?

Ludlow and Diskant's hunt drives the rest of the movie, which unfolds to reveal expected revelations about the expansive gray area separating good and evil. Ayer's knack for encapsulating pockets of West Coast noir is unmistakable (see his Dark Blue), but with stars who seem wholly uninvested in the process (Reeves and Whitaker are on autopilot), no one comes out king of anything.

(drew.lazor@citypaper.net)

STREET KINGS

Directed by David Ayer

A Fox Searchlight release