Street Kings. On DVD now. Review - Toweringly generic. (*****5/10)
Monday, December 29th, 2008“We’s the walking, talking exigent circumstances”
There are good things and bad things about Street Kings. I would say, about an equal number of both. Which is why I’ve split this review down the middle and given it five stars out of ten stars. First, the good - Hugh Laurie, Forest Whitaker, Naomie Harris, Terry Crews. Now, the bad - none of the actors just mentioned play large roles in the movie. Pivotal roles, yes. But not large ones. The large roles are played by Keanu Reeves and Chris Evans (that flaming guy from Fantastic Four). Keanu Reeves is not terrible in this film, nor is Chris Evans, but I would certainly have liked to see more of Whitaker, Crews and Harris, and less of them.
As with most movies about cop corruption, the Big Secret is revealed only at the end. And, as with most movies about cop corruption, it is a Big Secret we have all seen coming from the get-go. There are some convincing moments where Reeves is conflicted, and convincingly set-upon, but these moments are almost always made less powerful and compelling by what happens next. I’ll give an example in a few moments. Reeves, you see, is a corrupt cop himself. Not necessarily corrupt in the sense of taking money, but corrupt as in renegade. As the movie opens, he wipes out an entire house of Chinese bad guys single-handedly. He kills the ones with guns, the ones without guns, and the ones sitting on the toilet.
He is confronted afterward by his former partner, played by Terry Crews, who is black. Crews gets in his face, questioning whether the victims in the house were armed or unarmed. The suggestion is made that Reeves’ character is a racist, and that may be the real reason he wiped out a house full of foreigners. Certainly, his behaviour moments before the murders was indicative of a deep-seeded racism. But then his boss, (Forest Whitaker, who is also black) comes by, pulls Reeves away, and congratulates him enthusiastically for the killings. His actions are totally excused, and this latent racism subplot is never really brought up again. It just disappears.
Over and over, we see Reeves drinking from little vodka bottles as he drives around on the job. But again, his drinking problem is never explored. And it has nothing to do with the story at all. It’s like the film makers said - well, he’s the star in a movie about police corruption. So…he’d better have a dead wife and a drinking problem. Why? Because everyone who stars in a police corruption movie (except Serpico) has a dead wife (and possibly a dead kid as well) and a drinking problem! Or, at the very least, one or the other. 16 Blocks, Hard To Kill, Assault on Precinct 13…the list goes on. And on. And on and on and on. And Street Kings never does anything to set itself apart from any of these movies.
There is a shadowy Big Bad Guy (we all know, however, who it is right away) who apparently has a collection of Deep Dark Secrets about everyone in town. The mayor, the police chief, all of the police captains and officials. The secrets this man possesses are So Big that no one can touch him, despite the evil enterprises with which he is involved. These secrets are never revealed. We are just supposed to accept that they are powerful enough to keep this man above the law, and that it’s in everyone’s best interests to have these secrets destroyed. Again, this is a convention of so many cop-corruption movies before this one. But I want to think about this for a while.
Let’s suppose you have a Big Secret with which you could blackmail your chief of police and your mayor. In my case, that would be Ottawa Police Chief Vern White and Ottawa Mayor Larry O’Brien. Now, what kind of secret could I have that would allow me to kill and sell drugs and engage in human trafficking and fraud and embezzlement and God knows what else here in Ottawa with impunity? Let’s suppose it’s the kind of secret that would keep White and O’Brien totally in line. What could that be? I suppose some sort of big crime. Like, they got together and murdered a guy. O’Brien cut up the body, White took the shovel and buried the garbage bag. If this is the case, shouldn’t they be the ones we want taken down? Why are we worried about protecting their secrets if that’s what the secret is?
And on the other side - let’s suppose the secret is something more innocuous. Like, they’re gay lovers. Movies still seem to think that homosexuality is a Deep Dark Secret that can be used to blackmail people in positions of power. If you’re running for office as an anti-gay-rights Conservative, I can understand that being used for blackmail - but for everything else? Imagine going up to the police chief and saying “if you don’t let me commit one murder a week, I will tell everyone you’re gay”. See how far that gets you. Basically, what I’m saying is that the “he’s got information on all of us” plot convention only works if the officials being blackmailed are as corrupt, if not moreso, than the blackmailer. In this case, they are not. They aren’t even in the movie.
And then the end of the movie. Once again, the end, like everything else in Street Kings, is toweringly generic. Once again, the actions and crimes we see have no reasonable or logical consequences. The Big Bad Guy is revealed to be…exactly who we always knew he was. Reeves does dozens, if not hundreds, of ethically questionable things in the final twenty minutes, but no one, not even his fresh-faced rookie sidekick, thinks to actually question them. By the time the movie reaches it’s pre-ordained, telegraphed conclusion, we have forgotten about his dead wife and “drinking problem”. We no longer worry about his tendency toward racism. All of that stuff has been swept out of the door in favour of this Staggeringly Usual movie stuff.
Because Street Kings is so powerfully standard, there is only one piece of advice I can give - if you like this sort of thing, then watch it. If you like good movies, then don’t.