Street Kings is a LAPD thriller starring Keanu Reeves as a morally-conflicted detective with as many violent tendencies as hero complexes. It's not one of the old style hero cop movies, not by any measure. Keanu's not working to solve a huge crime, or bring down a powerful drug dealer. He's not breaking in a new partner, or trying to do his job while a by-the-book captain rides his ass. He doesn't even have a bunch of wacky buddies at the station, or a wife who nags him about risking it all "For what? Those people don't care about you!"
The film is kind of a character study, where details gradually emerge from the minutia of day to day operations, rather than from major dramatic events. Who's character are we studying? It's not clear. Not Keanu's, or any of the other cops, since they're mostly one or two-dimensional types. Even the ones with complexity and layers are immediately shown to be layered and complex, so all along you know their surface appearance is not going to fully define them.
In my judgment, the character being examined is the character of society and law enforcement, and how cops have to act to do their jobs. The ends almost always justify the means in this film, and everyone is morally ambiguous and compromised. What kind of corruption is bad? How much is too much? What if corruption serves a good purpose; stopping criminals, saving kidnapped girls, providing assistance for cops when they're down on their luck?
All valid questions, but the film is much more interested in violence and action, and exploiting the violence and action for entertainment purposes than it is in seriously grappling with any of the big issues it brings up, then skirts around. It's very unclear, even at the end, who the good guys and bad guys are, and that's quite intentional. I didn't get so deeply involved in the film that I cared; it was more about entertainment than thought provocation, but it was more interesting than just another traditional, formulaic cop buddy thriller. Scores:
Street Kings, 2008
Script/Story: 6
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 7
Eye Candy: 3
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 6
Overall: 6
I don't know if I liked this movie or not. I didn't dislike it, but it didn't really do much for me. It's got pretensions of grandiosity and of being thought provoking, but it doesn’t quite do it. It's not quite noir, and it's not a morality play. I wouldn't even say it deals in shades of gray, since the characters and events in the film aren't morally gray. They're usually black or white, often bleeding into each other from one moment to the next. On the whole the film is a rather dark gray, but I couldn't say what the movie's moral is, or if it's even has one. If it does, it's something like, "Corruption is an illusion, since cops have to do what they have to do to get their jobs done, until eventually there's some corruption so large and evil that it must be destroyed. And if countless laws must be broken in the process, the ends always justify the means."
To ground this theory in a bit of practicality, I'll give a quick plot summary, which is somewhat
spoilery, but only of events in the first half hour of the film. I won't get into the bigger plot twists.
Keanu is the hero, or at least the protagonist. He's very cowboy and crazy, but his methods are functional. The movie opens with him faking a weapon sale to some Asian gangsters, simply to get them to steal his car. He uses his car's GPS to track them to their hideout, busts in solo and blows them all away without making any effort to identify himself as a cop or to take any prisoners, and then plants evidence to exculpate himself; firing shots from their guns, finding weapons and throwing them near the bodies, etc. But it's all good, since he knew they were drug dealers, and it turns out that they had kidnapped two girls and locked in a rape room.
It's soon revealed that this is Keanu's style. He essentially uses his police authority and resources as a piggy bank to carry out private raids of "justice," and gets away with it because he's effective and because his captain, played by Forest Whitaker, always has his back. There are many dramatic speeches throughout the film with Whitaker, other high ranking cops, and by Keanu in his own defense, all rhapsodizing about how he does what has to be done, and how he's the "tip of the spear," and how they might not like it, but they know they need him.
As events unfold in the film we learn that Keanu's former partner grew embittered by the corruption and that he is now talking to internal affairs. Keanu thinks the guy is diming him out, and when he goes to beat him up, he's interrupted by two gang bangers who execute the other cop and make their getaway. This would appear to solve Keanu's problems, but since the other guy was his estranged buddy, he's got a tie of honor and must hunt track the killers to get revenge. He is, of course, quick to use innumerable extralegal means to hunt them down, including torturing suspects, bribing informants, trading stolen drugs, etc.
Things are not as they appear with the two suspects though, and (of course) the corruption goes much higher than it initially appears. The way this information is presented is unusual, in that Keanu's character is utterly lacking in introspection. He just does what he does, and he's very bulldog and determined in it. By the time it begins to dawn on him that his friends might not be who he thinks they are, the audience has long since realized this.
Most films would pause the action at that point, to give the protagonist some time to think things over. Does he reflect on his own constant law breaking, and realize the people he's hunting are just like him? That they're working for their own greater good and that the sins they must commit are necessary evils?
No. Keanu doesn't seem to think at all, and the script doesn't require or even allow him to, since events always transpire to keep him moving forward without time or need for introspection. This keeps the movie, and to a large extent the audience, from doing so either. Not during the film, anyway. Afterwards, maybe. I found it an interesting approach by the film, since it actively avoids considering the moral dilemma that the viewer expects to be at the heart of the movie. The murderous, criminal behavior of almost every cop in the film isn't analyzed or evaluated at all. They just do what they do, and then something else happens and they're off to react to that.
There's morality in the film, but it's deeply tweaked and skewed. Keanu's character is a bad guy in almost any other cop movie. He's only the good guy in comparison to the other bad guys in this movie, and when the head bad guy is revealed, it's arguable if he's bad at all, for the same reason that Keanu's the hero; both get results, and are working for what they think is a greater good.
In retrospect, the movie lacks any kind of moral center or even a moral compass. It lacks those things by design, not by accident, and if there's a moral discussion to engage in about this film, it's got to be about that meta point. How could this movie have been made differently? What did the
clashing styles and resumes of the writer and director grind together to create? Whose vision is ultimately presented by the movie? What is a viewer meant to take away from this presentation?
Street Kings isn't quite intelligent enough to function as a Rorschach test for the viewer, but even that might be intentional; it's not a film with a message, and its un-message is a sort of message in of itself.
I can't recommend this movie on an intellectual level. I can recommend it on a stupid level; if you just want to see a cop movie with a bunch of action and entertaining violence and don't want to think, you could enjoy it for that purpose. Lots of bad guys get blown away real good. On the other hand, there will always be better choices than this one to satisfy your action film jones, so perhaps even that level of endorsement has to be leavened?
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