'Street Kings'

Rating:

BY RAFER GUZMÁN | rafer.guzman@newsday.com

April 11, 2008

You can always count on James Ellroy for a night of feel-bad entertainment. In novels like "White Jazz" and "American Tabloid," his prose is blunt and brutal; the film adaptations of his books, like "L.A. Confidential" and "The Black Dahlia," mix the tough dialogue of old gangster flicks with modern, bloody action. The common threads are pervasive pessimism and cheerless violence.

Why do Ellroy's dark books so frequently make their way into America's brightly lit multiplexes? I have a theory: Ellroy's stories typically focus on Los Angeles, a town that loves to make movies about its own ugliness. It's a perverse streak visible in the film noirs of the 1940s, modern crime dramas like "To Live and Die in L.A.," even an oddball comedy like "Repo Man." That streak runs wide and deep in "Street Kings," Ellroy's first original screenplay, written with Kurt Wimmer and Jamie Moss.

The film opens with Det. Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) waking up at dusk, bringing up last night's booze, then going for a drive while knocking back mini-bottles of vodka. He's on an assignment - to sell a machine-gun to a couple of twitchy criminals - and he's not exactly following procedure.

Ludlow is part of a team of rogue cops who help clean up hard-to-reach stains. Under the fond tutelage of Capt. Jack Wander ( Forest Whitaker), Ludlow has become the team's lead Rottweiler: angry, vicious, numb to fear. His humanity is nearly gone; he even shoots a man sitting on a toilet. ("That's sacred," one of his pals objects.)

Ludlow's sociopathy drives the plot: When an honest cop begins snitching to Internal Affairs, Ludlow decides to solve the problem himself. (Step one: wrap leather belt around fist.) But the problem is bigger than Ludlow realized, and soon a series of discoveries will make his world look darker than ever.

"Street Kings" benefits from a fine cast: Whitaker's clipped diction hints at ruthlessness; Hugh Laurie ("House") turns his peripheral role as an Internal Affairs captain into a complex character; Jay Mohr plays a creepy cop whose neat blond mustache is evil itself.

As for Reeves, I have a theory on him, too: His stony presence can serve as an anchor in wild, unhinged films like "Devil's Advocate" or the "Matrix" trilogy, but he's less believable in movies that call for realism. Because "Street Kings" falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, so does Reeves' effectiveness.

David Ayer, who wrote "Training Day," directs with enough flash to keep the action crisp and nasty. But he can't swagger his way through Ellroy's swampy storyline, which traps its characters in cynicism and amorality. In "Street Kings," the fun always comes at a price.

STREET KINGS. Keanu Reeves is a semi-psychotic cop in James Ellroy's latest exploration of the Los Angeles underbelly. Look for rappers Common and The Game as thugs. 1:47 (profanity, extreme violence). At area theaters.