Blu ray Movies

Street Kings (+ Digital Copy) [Blu-ray] Review

4.0 from 5

I am one of the first people to admit how small a range Keanu Reeves has in regards to acting skill. However, as The Matrix proved, even actors with the skill level of Reeves can get a part that winds up being perfect for their style or range of acting. Street Kings is such a movie and its easily Keanu’s best performance since The Matrix. In fact one could argue that in regards to acting, that this performance is actually much better than his performance in The Matrix. In other words one could make the argument that this is Keanu’s best work yet.

Street Kings excels on pretty much every level. It has an outstanding cast, it has a great story and its has about as perfect a pace as a crime drama dealing with this subject matter can have. It opens up fast and strong and it never drags. Why this film didn’t receive more praise from the critics is beyond me. It’s probably because the critics are biased when it comes to Keanu. They don’t like him, never have and never will, regardless of how great a particular movie or a particular performance by Keanu really is.

This film is basically a superior version of Dark Blue. If you enjoy crime drama’s, especially ones that have intelligent stories and involve some serious gun play, then you should absolutely give Street Kings a look. The casting is just outstanding and everyone gives a worthy performance especially Hugh Laurie, Forest Whitaker and Keanu Reeves. It would be nice to see Hugh Laurie in more roles like this as he really was just brilliant.

The bottom line – Street Kings is easily one of the best crime dramas of the last 10 years and one of the most underrated films I have seen in a very long time. Yes, it really is that good!

Street Kings (+ Digital Copy) [Blu-ray] Specifications

Street Kings is a pungent bouquet of corruption, violence, multi-ethnic mayhem, macho glee laced with macho angst, and fluorescently obscene dialogue from the mind of James Ellroy. Its hero, though he’d scarcely consent to be called one, is L.A. police detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves), for whom life is a wound that won’t heal and dealing out retribution to scumbags is the ongoing treatment. Ludlow’s the star player–”the tip of the [expletive] spear”–on a team of detectives headed by Capt. Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker). Coach Wander relies on his boys to keep breaking lurid cases, usually through deeply darkside underground work, and raising his profile with the media and the department. In pursuit of these goals, nothing is forbidden except failure, and the truth is what you make it look like. This is familiar Ellroy territory, most effectively translated to the screen in L.A. Confidential (which should have won the 1997 Oscar, and would have if Titanic hadn’t launched that year). If you know Ellroy’s ground game, you can pretty much guess where Street Kings is going, and where it’s been. Still, the twists and torques of its urban road-rage course maintain the centrifugal force needed to hold us in our seats (a tactical highlight: refrigerator adapted as rolling barricade), and the movie keeps bopping us with oddball casting coups: comic Jay Mohr and Northern Exposure/Sex and the City veteran John Corbett as two members of Coach Warden’s gonzo detective squad; Cedric the Entertainer doing a nicely nuanced turn as a street creature; Hugh Laurie doing a less-hyper version of House, if House worked Internal Affairs.

The problem is that director David Ayer keeps everything intense. Dialogues are shot too close-up, line readings are too strident, the action is too nonstop slam. Recall Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential and the mind’s eye summons up a whole spectrum of existence, mood, place, historical period, emotional investment; there’s an amplitude to the picture and the sensibility bringing it to us, something besides the whodunit and the endless rap sheet of nasty what-they-done. Everything in Street Kings is one-note, and with Keanu Reeves playing it implosive and Forest Whitaker locked in crazier-than-an-outhouse-rat mode, that’s no way to stay the course. –Richard T. Jameson

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Stills from Street Kings (Click for larger image)

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