Street Kings Movie Review
Posted by Kevin Carr (kevin@filmschoolrejects.com) on April 11, 2008
While watching Street Kings, I kept having flashbacks to Point Break. And it wasn’t just because Keanu Reeves was in both films. It was more than that. It had to do with the flood of testosterone that drenched the film.
Street Kings tries so hard to be a hard-core, serious cop drama. However, with the wooden acting and alarmingly un-thuggish nature of Keanu – and the even less thuggish nature of Cedric the Entertainer – it becomes a powder-keg of silliness.
The story follows a corrupt, racist LAPD detective named Tom Ludlow (Keanu), who roams the streets alone after his partner Washington (Terry Crews) was busted down to uniform patrol and ratted him out to Internal Affairs. Ludlow carries a grudge, and he follows Washington one day in order to beat him up.
Ludlow’s plans go awry when gang bangers bust into the shop where Washington was and mow him down with machine guns. Ludlow feels bad because didn’t want the guy dead, so he pushes for an investigation. Against the advisement of his buddies on the force and his superior (Forrest Whitaker), Ludlow keeps trying to solve the murder and uncovers something even more disturbing.
To be honest, I don’t think there’s a shred of this film that I haven’t seen somewhere before – and often times in multiple places. It really seems like the screenwriters put every scrap of dialogue from every cop movie in the past 20 years on index cards, threw them all in the air and made a script out of what fluttered down on the ground.
Like Point Break, Street Kings relies on macho confrontation to bridge the gap between action sequences. This works occasionally, but it seems that every conversation turns into a yelling match, even if it really doesn’t warrant that much emotion.
And while Keanu doesn’t quite pull off the hardened cop loaded with street cred, some of the casting decisions were even worse. Hugh Laurie, who is a fine actor in his own right, plays an I.A. investigator who first appears in a hospital E.R. The inappropriate connection to House is impossible to miss, and it completely takes the audience out of the film.
Another terrible casting choice was Cedric the Entertainer as one of the drug dealing thugs that works with the cops. We first see him on a rap sheet, and in the screening I attended, the audience busted out in laughter when they saw him. With the exception of Steve Urkel, I can’t think of a more out-of-place casting choice.
On top of bad casting decisions, hackneyed dialogue and so much machismo it would make Mister Furley blush, the film loses sight of all the issues it brings up. For example, Ludlow is supposed to be a dirty, racist cop. Yet, the racism angle is completely abandoned about a third of the way into the film, never to be heard from again.
It’s not that I was looking for a film to contemplate this, but I expected the filmmakers to at least follow through with the concept, for better or for worse. Ultimately, the film starts to unravel in the first fifteen minutes and eventually loses all cohesion in the final act.
It’s not that Street Kings isn’t fun to watch. The action is cool, the gunplay is fun and there so many things that are unintentionally funny, this could have been one of the best spoof movies of the year… if only that’s what the filmmakers intended.
THE UPSIDE: It’s stupid enough to make you laugh.
THE DOWNSIDE: It wasn’t intended to make you laugh.
ON THE SIDE: I only wish Fox Searchlight would fund Trey Parker and Matt Stone to reshoot this film (with the current soundtrack and dialogue) with their Team America puppets. That would be awesome!
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