Suspense-less 'Street Kings' lacks twists and turns

By Michael Sragow | Sun Movie Critic

April 11, 2008

(C+) Street Kings is like a sideshow shooting gallery that wants to award you a Ph.D. in sociology instead of a stuffed toy or 10 free shots. It would be easier to take as gory, lowdown fun if it weren't giving you the third degree in more ways than one.

But it may be the first effective audience-participation film of 2008. See it with people who take it for the trash it is, and you can cheer the baroque killings and laugh fondly with Forest Whitaker as he tries too hard to create a domestic sociopath to match his role as Idi Amin.

Keanu Reeves plays the ace "gunfighter" in a special LAPD vice squad trained to wipe out bad guys by hook or by crook. At report time, he writes up sneak attacks and worse as if they were by-the-book takedowns. Whitaker plays the mentor who treats him like his pet attack dog.

The system starts to fall apart when Reeves' ex-partner (Terry Crews) rats him out (or so he thinks) to Internal Affairs. Because he wants to break his old friend's jaw, Reeves puts himself in the wrong place at the wrong time - he's on-site when a couple of stone-cold killers mow the whistle-blower down.

So our antihero must try to keep his head down managing a police complaint desk (it's one of the film's few witty strokes) while a relatively clean, green cop (Chris Evans) helps him figure out what really happened and an Internal Affairs honcho ( Hugh Laurie) breathes down their necks.

In this movie's purple vision of the thin blue line, the director, David Ayer (Harsh Times), best known for writing Antoine Fuqua's Training Day, wants us to see Reeves as the man even an acerbic IA officer like Laurie thinks he needs to eradicate trouble spots. Corruption in this movie is a given; you guess nearly everyone is on the take long before you realize that slithery, smirky Jay Mohr is playing Reeves' sergeant.

Ayer, along with co-writers James Ellroy, Kurt Wimmer and Jamie Moss, may think that in a hard-shelled, blue-suit way he's navigating mean streets like Raymond Chandler and unraveling the sources of "malaise." (That's what Edmund Wilson said Chandler did.)

But before Ayer spills an ounce of exposition, the audience for this kind of picture knows that everyone except Evans is tainted. There's no mystery to the "who" or "why" here; the suspense or humor comes only from "how" - that is, how quickly and how deeply the urban whirlpool-cesspool will suck each character down.

The way Ayer views Reeves' gunfighter, he's at least an honest executioner, despite his lies; he's in it for the danger and the glory, not money or power. Despite his alcohol abuse (which doesn't mar his reflexes) and his mourning for his wife (who died of a blood clot while she was committing adultery - how's that for a throwaway back story?), he's a straight man in every sense.

Reeves and Clint Eastwood - why have I never made this connection before, not even when watching Reeves play the roguish FBI man in Point Break? They use the same unimaginative but effective performing tactics: Pushing monotones to extremes to create an audiovisual deadpan, siphoning out humor or scraps of intelligence so they always seem to be surprising.

And in Evans, Reeves has the kind of sidekick Eastwood has always needed to make him look good. Laurie may get the crowd on his side the minute he snarls menacing putdowns in his popular House style, but Evans is the only one who comes close to forging a character. He doesn't look much younger than Reeves, but he's persuasive as an up-and-comer who must test himself in the streets before he can feel like a real man. Cedric the Entertainer squirms amusingly as a gaudy small-timer caught in the crossfire, but the biggest laugh in the movie comes when Reeves makes a gutsy move and Evans asks, in disbelief, "Are you bored?"

Street Kings isn't boring, but it peaks two-thirds of the way through, when Reeves uses a refrigerator as a combination shield and battering ram in a shoot-out. Ayer is at his best exploiting props like handcuffs, but he's not yet an action virtuoso: He shoots Reeves' climactic confrontation with Whitaker so up-close and personal it's hard to know what's going on.

At that point, all the audience wants to see is justice done - or maybe just "The End." I thought there was a tinge of relief mixed in with the applause. But that just may have been my own wishful thinking.

>>>Street Kings (Fox Searchlight) Starring Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker, Hugh Laurie, Chris Evans. Directed by David Ayer. Rated R for violence, language and sexual content. Time 108 minutes.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com