Street Kings: Not the best, not the worst Keanu film

Street Kings is not new but for some reason it popped up on the top ten in my region list in the past week. The film was originally released in 2008 and was considered a minor success by most people's standards but a flop by Keanu standards. I think I know what that is as well.

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Keanu plays the role of Tom Ludlow, who is a LAPD police detective that seems to be able to do whatever the hell he wants to with very little oversight. This is basically the role that has been done so many times before by so many others and while Keanu does nail his role, there are a lot of really impractical things that happen throughout the story. This isn't to say that it isn't entertaining but when there are moments where he is in the armory room at the police station just taking whatever weaponry he feels like taking with him without checking it out with anyone it starts to become a "I'm pretty sure it doesn't work like that" type story.

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He's a bad ass cop who drinks on the job and just goes after his various missions without any sort of checking in with his superiors to the point where when the captain does turn up at the crime scenes he is completely unaware that Tom (Keanu) was actually going on this mission at all. This is where we start to figure out that the stupidly named Jack Wander (played by Forest Whitaker) is probably a dirty cop. Sorry for the spoiler but seriously, this is evident really early on.

At no point during the film does Tom face any sort of penalty for his renegade actions and for reasons that would not exist in the real world he continues to do everything without any oversight at all, presumably because he gets the job done.

The films is still entertaining because of Keanu's performance, but when there are certain twists introduced it almost seems as though they were trying to do a reboot of Training Day but on level where the renegade cop isn't the bad guy. It's a copycat film and the review scores are reflected accordingly as it has around a 38% approval rating. Professional critics across the board basically panned it calling it "soulless" and I can kind of agree with this assessment. It is just a bunch of violence with a completely impractical story behind it.

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For me the most disappointing thing about this film wasn't the flimsy story but rather the very poor performance of Forest Whitaker who just seems like he is one shout away from drooling all over himself throughout the entire film. I've never really thought he was a very good actor anyway though, so I might be a bit biased here. I tend to look for his shortcoming because I don't think he is good.

Should I watch it?

Upon watching that trailer I just came to the realization that this film has the same director as Training Day .. lol, so I guess that it isn't that surprising that the films are actually very similar. I think that if you wanted to have something on in the background with some good action every now and then that this would be ok but there are probably a lot of other things that you could be watching that are a lot better than this. This film has its moments, but mostly it isn't anything special.