Street Kings.

"An ungainly and fetid but seldom dull mishmash of 70s Eastwood, Lethal Weapon, and a high-octane Serpico, Street Kings opportunistically miscasts [Keanu] Reeves as 'the point of the spear' among a unit of Dirty Harrys, but it's only a semi-mistake," writes Bill Weber in Slant. "Keanu's metronome cadences and recessive persona are a seeming nonstarter for a menacing, reckless cop, but as a dissipated, lost soul who's only saved from oblivion when he struggles against the ethical whirlpool he finds himself in, he resonates."

Alonso Duralde at MSNBC: "Street Kings may have one of the year's most depressing screen credits: 'Story by James Ellroy. Screenplay by James Ellroy and Kurt Wimmer and Jamie Moss.' That's right - the filmmakers had an original story and screenplay by one of the greatest living crime novelists, but somewhere along the line some genius decided, 'Hey, let's bring in the guy who wrote the movie version of Sphere to punch this thing up. Oh, and you've got a third writer with no screen credits? Even better.'"

Updated through 4/15.

"Though conceived as yet another sobering frontline report on law enforcement's ever-expanding gray area, director David Ayer's grim police thriller mostly plays as one long dick-measuring competition," writes Tim Grierson in the Voice. "You sense that an infinitely more complex drama exists within the film's grasp, but no one bothered to stop guzzling the testosterone long enough to find it."

"Ayer penned Training Day and recently helmed the unpleasant Christian Bale-gone-psycho-homeboy dud Harsh Times," notes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "He seems fascinated by knuckleheaded machismo in the 'hood, without having anything particularly interesting or relevant to say about it. The material's inherent deja vu isn't helped by his flat staging, claustrophobic compositions and numerous improbable scenes in which everyone stands around explaining the plot, when they should just be shooting at each other."

"Essentially, the film feels like a pulpy late-40s noir made on the cheap, only with a couple of multiplex 'names' (Reeves and Forest Whitaker) and an assortment of eccentric co-stars (Cedric the Entertainer, Jay Mohr, Hugh Laurie, Common and The Game)," writes Cullen Gallagher in the L Magazine.

"Why can't Hollywood and the most celebrated crime writer of our time get along?" asks Scott Timberg in the Los Angeles Times. "While most remember only LA Confidential and Black Dahlia, Ellroy's writings have provided material for movies for 20 years, including Cop, a 1988 James Woods-starring version of Fire on the Moon, which [editor and publisher Otto] Penzler called 'unbelievably awful'; the 1998 bomb Brown's Requiem; and 2002's box-office disappointment Dark Blue which starred Kurt Russell.... [T]he word 'unfilmable' comes up a lot when people talk about Ellroy's work."

John Clark talks with Ayer for Premiere.

Updates, 4/10: "Reeves plays the morally conflicted Ludlow as an uncanny impersonation of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry," agrees Armond White in the New York Press. "If only Street Kings' director, David Ayers, and screenwriter, James Ellroy, had the wit to complement Keanu's ingenuity; instead, Street Kings unintentionally provokes laughter."

"Ayers' scripts read like the work of a latchkey kid left home with a battered VHS tape of To Live and Die in LA," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "In that William Friedkin classic, a pair of cops, one a moral blank slate, the other a gonzo narcissist, use their state-sanctioned power to cross far, far over the thin blue line. It's a structure that Ayers has reproduced intact in every one of his films so far... To make an Ayers film, you place a ruthless but charismatic older cop in the driver's seat of a Crown Victoria, plonk down an Oedipally challenged rookie by his side, fill the glove box with miniature bottles of vodka, speed to the ghetto, and see what happens. But what if the cop in that driver's seat isn't Denzel Washington or Kurt Russell but the waxen, perpetually boyish Keanu Reeves?"

Updates, 4/11: "It's easy to laugh at Street Kings for its bigger than big emotions, its preposterously kinky narrative turns and overwrought jawing and yowling, but there's no doubt that it also keeps you watching, really watching, all the way to the end," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "The film can be unintentionally, often grotesquely, funny... What Mr Ayer doesn't appear to have realized - a mistake shared by Brian De Palma in his unfortunate adaptation of Mr Ellroy's crime novel The Black Dahlia - is that you don't need to gild a 24-karat lily. It's plenty shiny already."

"We live, so the story goes, in a nation of laws, but we also seem to accept, if quietly, that some laws will occasionally have to be broken if others - the laws we really care about - are to be enforced," writes Andrew Stuttaford in the New York Sun. "Sometimes, of course, a rogue cop is just a rogue cop. The difficulty of distinguishing between good policemen and bad is, I suppose, the theme trying to survive the splattering gore, rampaging clichés, and flying bullets that otherwise define the noisy, nasty, but sporadically watchable Street Kings."

"The movie runs around chasing subplots, letting the actors chew it up, while Reeves does the opposite," writes Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune. "He doesn't chew. He practices his seething, keeping his voice in as low and weary a register as possible, trying to Clint and Vin Diesel his way through a role not well-suited to his preferred Zen-like mode."

"Street Kings is an anemic attempt to evoke the big, shiny action pictures of the late 80s and early 90s, the heyday of Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, when Timothy Dalton was 007 and Clint Eastwood had fewer wrinkles and bigger hair," writes Jim Emerson at RogerEbert.com.

"After all the actorly fireworks, Street Kings concludes that the LAPD is an institution where even the well-intentioned can't work clean," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "Okay. What else?"

Peter Martin's got a list at Cinematical: "Out of Control Cops."

At IFC, Stephen Saito takes "a look at the behind the scenes history of Ellroy's film career that's nearly as tangled and tortured as one of his novels."

"Street Kings, though it isn't a great movie, is a pretty damn cool Keanu Reeves movie, one that on the Reevesian action scale measures somewhere between 'Whoa' and 'Wow,'" writes Time's Richard Corliss.

"Hey, Hollywood," calls out Shawn Levy, "When somebody dreams up a dumb idea, you're allowed to say 'no.'"

"[T]his is a bloody crime caper in a somewhat lackluster month, so if you're looking for some big, stupid fun, you could do worse than Street Kings," writes Jenni Miller in Premiere.

Reeves "attacks his role with the force of a flaccid penis, counting on expository dialogue to detail his character," writes Jim Rohner at Zoom In Online.

Updates, 4/12: "As yet another tale of dirty criminals and even dirtier cops, Street Kings works well enough, albeit strictly in a "been there, seen that" sort of way," writes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical.

Joe Queenan is sticking with Keanu, no matter what.

Update, 4/15: Lesley O'Toole talks with Keanu Reeves for the Independent.

Posted by dwhudson at April 9, 2008 11:57 AM