Hollywood is cleaning out the closet so it can introduce its schedule of highly-anticipated summer blockbusters.
Meanwhile, audiences are left holding worthless goods, staring emptily as the remaining stock of threadbare films are put on display at the cinema yard sale.
The newest product on the block is the heavily promoted evil cop thriller, “Street Kings.”
Tom Ludlow is a cop, who remains bereft months after the death of his wife in another man’s arms.
The film begins with Ludlow singlehandedly cracking a kidnapping case involving a pair of Korean girls.
To seek release from the tension of work and his oppressive thoughts, Ludlow has hit the bottle, begun volunteering for ever-increasingly dangerous missions and looks for comfort in the comradeship of friends.
Ludlow’s friends are not ordinary officers. They are a select, shadowy group dedicated to ridding the streets of Los Angeles from vermin who prey on its frightened inhabitants.
A fellow cop and Ludlow’s former partner, Terrence Washington, has grown a clean conscience and has ratted on Ludlow and the gang to Internal Affairs. The IA investigator then fixes his sights on Ludlow, whom he recognizes as team’s lynchpin.
Unluckily for Ludlow, he becomes an eyewitness to a murder at a botched hold-up. His personal judgment, loyalty to his friends and dedication to his boss will now be called into question.
“Street Kings” surrenders ingenuity in its conception, is defeated in execution and disappoints in its abdication of the moral ambiguities surrounding law enforcement.
Blame should be laid on the genius who decided on Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker, Common, Cedric the Entertainer, Hugh Laurie, the Game, Jay Mohr and Chris Evans, inhabiting the same picture.
If it were an appeal to different demographics, it not only failed, it exposed the limitation of sacrificing the integrity of the film at the shrine of projected box office receipts.
But the greater sin was having Reeves as Ludlow and Whitaker as his boss, Captain Wander. Mild-mannered Reeves is an actor on autopilot whose single sullen expression serves as template for all manner of emotions, ranging from anger to anxiety to elation. Whitaker was worse. Not only was Wander incredible as a character, Whitaker faxed his performance in from Kampala.
When is he going to lose Idi Amin’s accent?
Director David Ayer consoles himself with the knowledge he ended the film with a twist. He apparently assumes his audience will be placated with an extra serving of strawberry licorice.
Actually all the director lazily does is spin the film around to expose its backside.
“Street Kings” excelled in its fetishization of gore and its gratuitous, sadistic take on violence.
Haven’t we had enough of films unwilling to approach death with the necessary fear and trembling; films that delight in the body count?
Films like “Street Kings” treat death as an event, an extinguishing of the candle of life. A gun shot, a puff, the body stops breathing and we are gone; our celestial journey is over.
They lack a metaphysics, an underlying concept of reality, a feel for moral compunction, a sense of guilt or an innate belief in right and wrong.
Ayer takes the stance that normal police techniques are incapable of prosecuting scum, and extra-judicial methods must be used to exact retribution. He reminds us that his cops aren’t really bad; they are simply using better methods, some we might object to because we find them distasteful.
In the course of carrying out what could be assumed to be his duty as an officer, Ludlow impassively dispatches his victims – our suspects – without remorse. Ayer would prefer we cheer from the sidelines.
Street Kings joins an expanding list, which includes the TV series “Dexter,” where cops cross uncharted legal territory in pursuit of criminals.
In “Dexter,” a blood splatter analyst for the police department in Miami moonlights as a serial killer, meticulously dissecting his victims in the dead of the night.
His foster father, a former cop, discovered his psychopathic tendencies but channeled this murderous obsession to the extermination of Miami’s worst.
Films, like these, believe it is possible to obtain justice by going above the law. All they end up proving is that vigilantism promotes injustice and weakens the law.
As we remember the event at Virginia Tech, is it too much to ask why we need so much bloodshed in our movies?
What began as shock-and-awe with Sam Peckinpah has now assumed a life of its own and is now the new normal.
Consider that nothing stops an impressionable, psychologically-unbalanced person, someone incapable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality, from picking up a gun and killing scores of people.
As a bonus, such a person gets to be deified – or vilified, it does not matter – on television.
“Street Kings” conflates the investigation of a crime with its prosecution, attempts to imitate the classic bad cop movies and, instead, creates a forgettable pastiche.
—-Contact Freke Ette at [email protected]