Street Kings Review

You can’t really blame them for trying; with the ever present success of The Shield and a movie like L.A. Confindential, the whole “dirty cop do good” storyline was going to come full circle via el cinema. Street Kings is that flick that attempts to capture the drama and moral dilemnas of a show like The Shield in the 2hrs it remains on screen. While a film like L.A. Confindential or even Training Day certainly seem like templates for Street Kings, they represent lightning in a bottle, insofar that they are two of the best cop movies of the past twenty years. Street Kings is their junior and in general, a pretty mediocre flick.

Don’t get me wrong; I was loving the new Johnny Utah(a.k.a. Keanu Reeves as resident badass). He was a hurt machine; swearing and making racial slurs at every bad corner of the neighborhood and in general kicking some serious inner city ass. But what plays out well in a show like The Shield, is that every week you return to these characters and join them in their morally murky world. You take the good episodes with the bad, hoping that the end all story ends up being better. Street Kings attempts to execute on the same level, and does so to an extent, but ends up coming off as a bad episode of said show.

Reeves and various other preformances certainly made this better for me and the story itself isn’t bad. But the material seems so inferior to the talent preforming it, that they end up having to act like it’s Shakespeare, when it’s really just cop drama. It’s entertaining in the same realm as a Training Day, but certainly not as powerful. What should have been another intriguing and powerful foray into crime cinema ends up coming off as an extended finale of a TV show. Which isn’t to say it’s all that bad, just certainly doesn’t deliver. Wait for DVD kids, or just watch Training Day. I give this a 5 out of 10 Bones, for being watchable but forgettable.

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