PREMIERE'S REVIEW (posted 4/11/08)

Poor James Ellroy. Never mind the myriad of Dark Places that bald dome hosts; it’s more that his sleekly hardboiled crime novels have yet to really get the big-screen treatment they deserve, other than Oscar-drenched L.A. Confidential, which boasted an exemplary cast and a strong screenplay by Brian Helgeland (Man on Fire, Mystic River). Granted, it’s hard as hell to simplify the twisty turns of his tomes, and even harder to find modern actors who can inhabit his characters convincingly, but I have yet to recover from the abomination that was The Black Dahlia. And his other screenplays – White Jazz, for one – languish, passed from hand to hand or disappearing altogether.

Which is to say, Street Kings is neither as slinkily sexy as Kim Basinger’s Veronica Lake swoop, nor as laughably awful as Hilary Swank trying to pass as a homicidal femme fatale of the ‘40s. Street Kings takes place in modern-day Los Angeles; Keanu Reeves plays Detective Tom Ludlow, the typical emotionally wounded alcoholic cop who kills bad guys to save the innocent. His crew of cops is led by Captain Jack Wander, played by Forest Whitaker; it’s slightly embarrassing to watch the Oscar-winner mumble bullshit like “You went toe to toe with evil!” but what can you expect from a movie where Keanu suckles from booze in airplane bottles? Huge Laurie, sporting an impressive upper lip divot, plays an Internal Affairs detective trying to find out how Ludlow’s estranged partner, Detective Terrence Washington—who may or may not have been dropping the dime on Ludlow—ended up killed in what seems like a convenience store robbery gone bad.

The plot twists are as obvious as Jay Mohr’s Hitler ‘stache, and the lack of any multidimensional female characters – from Washington’s widow, played by Naomie Harris, to Ludlow’s paramour Grace, played by Martha Higareda – is a glaring omission, though somewhat typical of Ellroy’s writing. That said, this is a bloody crime caper in a somewhat lackluster month, so if you’re looking for some big, stupid fun, you could do worse than Street Kings.

—Jenni Miller