Street Kings

Directed by David Ayer

Starring Keanu Reeves, Forest Whittaker

Certificate 16

This Los Angeles-set cop movie is a vehicle for the deeply-attractive-in-a-dazed -way Keanu Reeves and I’m-a-proper-actor-me Forrest Whittaker.

Keanu does lots of shooting and vodka drinking as the LAPD cop who is mourning the loss of his wife.  However, he still looks as cute and lovable as he did in the Bill & Ted movies. 

He’s a super cop here; rock hard and straight as a die. Oh, sure, he’ll bend the rules in order to ventilate bad guys, but only the ones who really deserve it.  And he’s tortured, don’t forget the dead missus.

Anyway, it turns out that there are some bad cops on the LAPD team.  Keanu, obviously, isn’t going to stand for that kind of nonsense.

Whittaker plays his boss. Is he a good guy, or a bad guy? In the end, will you care? Well, by my experience, by the time you’re 50 minutes into this movie the only thing you’ll be caring about is whether you’re going to stay awake until the end.

This is a James Ellroy script, so you might be anticipating a hard-bitten movie with a series of twists and turns designed to keep you guessing and engrossed. Blood flows copiously with bad and good guys getting offed on a regular basis.

Sadly, it’s no Serpico, or even a Dirty Harry.

It is astonishing how one can become so desensitised to violence that it’s possible to watch a series of violent murders unfold as major and minor characters are dispatched in spectacular gun battles with blood and guts flying everywhere and still be mildly bored.

It’s time to bring back interesting plots and hip, snappy dialogue.  Street Kings is very predictable. There isn’t a character here you haven’t seen and been bored by before.