Street Kings

David Ayer is running the best scam in Hollywood. Over the past decade, he has been paid to make the same movie three times. He wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for Training Day, and Dark Blue, and directs the new film Street Kings. In all of these films, a crooked but conscience-ridden decent LA cop confronts an evil superior officer who embodies the corruption of the entire department. Ayer collaborates with neo-noir madman James Ellroy in both Dark Blue and Street Kings. Both films contain many of Ellroy's trademark obsessions, but little of his memorably pungent dialogue.

There's not much at all memorable about Street Kings, which feels like a warmed-over remix of not only all of Ayer's previous films, but pretty much every cop movie made in the past 30 years. There's even a speech ripped off from A Few Good Men in there somewhere.

Keanu Reeves is his usual blockedheaded self in the role of a violent, haunted LAPD detective and member of an elite Vice unit headed by Forest Whitaker, whose ferocious scenery chewing and fantastically cheesy cop moustache make for rare bright spots. When his former partner is killed in a botched liquor store robbery, Reeves' takes to the streets to find the killers. Along the way, he employs the two-fisted, smack-first-ask-questions-later investigatory techniques common to the genre on his way to uncovering secrets that will upend his world, and which the audience has figured out before the end of the first reel.

Steet Kings is crushingly generic in almost every detail. The only points of interest are Whitaker's aforemetioned facial hair (Jay Mohr, playing another member of the Vice unit, sports an impressive porn-stache himself), an the bone-deep cyncism displayed by the filmmakers towards the LAPD at all levels. Every cop in the film is motivated by some combination of mindless aggression, greed and desire for status. The characters snarl at, shoot at and extort each other in pursuit of personal ends, culminating in a final sequence that indicts the entire civic and political structure of the city of Los Angeles. This approach would be much more provocative and interesting if it didn't come swaddled in 90 minutes of retreaded cop movie tropes. If Ayer had slowed down the relentless, vacuous plot machinations in order to soak up some of the atmosphere and culture of the city and its police force, his points might resonate as more than white noise. As it stands, the question that Street Kings poses most acutely is: why watch this thing when the stellar police procedural shows The Wire and The Shield are readily available on DVD?