I finished watching Street Kings the other day with my friends and came to the realization that Los Angeles must be the scariest fucking place on this mad little planet we call home. This epiphany was slow in realizing but has been cemented as immutable fact by watching the “Harsh L.A” trilogy, as I call it: Training Day, Harsh Times, and Street Kings. If you ever thought of going to visit the city on the coast with its abundance of star homes map sellers, struggling bands confident of their edge and relevance, young actors following the “good looks” acting school, and surfer F.B.I agents, then I advise you to watch these three films and then make your travel plans somewhere else…like Iowa. The brainchild of David Ayer in some fashion, as writer of the first two and director of the last two, this trilogy of human suffering follows the protagonist through a day or more of life altering hijinks and brutality in the worst parts the city has to offer. I say protagonist because, with the exception of Ethan Hawke in Training Day, all the primary leads are defined as some shade of villain, be it the rogue cop or the psychotic soldier, inhabiting a world drowning in a muted sea of grey shades, where everyone sits on the dirty end of the anti-hero slide rule.
Being an evil bitter fuck that I am, I found all three of these films fantastically entertaining, well acted, but having a tendency to telegraph their hits with the subtly of the fat guy trying to pick up on chicks in a bar…drunk…and naked. Training Day stands as the only one of the three that keeps its mindfuck turnabout until the end, but because it injects a healthy does of dread throughout the film as Denzel Washington manipulates every living creature he encounters, the view is left to hold that gigantic shoe right above their heads for an hour just waiting for that sumbitch to fall. You know he is going to fuck with Ethan Hawke; it is just a matter of severity and distance. It falls into that “what the hell just happened” category of films that demand a second or third viewing to see just how far ahead of the pack the evil fucker was and to watch exactly where Washington first set up his dominos to fall. Remembering back to the 2002 Oscars I recalled with great distain and much gnashing of teeth when Denzel was the one who took the gold plated art deco mantelpiece home because I realized with my powerful alien brain that his work did not stand toe to toe with Russell Crowe’s crazy math genius guy and Tom Wilkinson’s murdering British father. I thought it lacked something, didn’t hold up. Well Mr. Alien is humble enough to report that he replaced that incorrect thinking, well, upgraded to a more “correct” mindset. I wasn’t wrong!!! I just had to modify my opinion. Washington’s Alonzo was the grand trickster, the puppet master that lost control of the strings. His machinations to survive in a brutal world make him appealing and horrendous at the same time.
Christian Bale’s Jim Luther Davis in Harsh Times had no suck dichotomy. I won’t spend as much time on this movie because I watched it twice…and it was one time too many. It was not bad in any way; far from it Harsh Times was a tightly directed and powerfully acted movie, with Christian Bale playing a dysfunctional and destructive ex-soldier whose very presence ruins the lives of those around him. When I say that one time was too many I mean that this movie is so dark, so depressing, with an ending that is fitting but hardly uplifting that I wanted to blow my corrosive brains out to escape its life eroding miasma. Some folks like the dark endings, the non “Hollywood” ending where shit just sometimes don’t work out and the world turns to fuck. Not this alien. Give me a happy, unrealistic, fuckbrain ending any day of the week, because life sucks donkey balls already, I don’t need a reminded of it that costs ten dollars and takes an hour and half to make its point. David Ayer takes the audience on the dark decent of Davis’ life as he pulls his friend Mike Alonzo, played by pre-Planet Terror Freddy RodrÃguez, into the impossible black world of the Los Angeles street life. Bale rocks, Ayer is sharp, and this movie is more depressing than watching Paul W.S. Anderson fuck up Aliens vs. Predator.
Finally, we come to Ayer’s magnum opus with Street Kings, with a return of Keanu Reeves to the one kind of character he can do somewhat well: a cop. When I watched this movie I knew who was dirty as fuck, who the mastermind was, who was going to get fucked over, who was going to die, and who was the guy that the hero can trust, and I knew this after seeing the respective characters five seconds after they came on screen. Oh, that is another thing, this movie had so many god damn interesting cameos that my friends began to take bets on which oddly casted actor would show up. Cheeseburger Eddie followed by House and Cedric the Entertainer with a little bit of Human Torch for flavor. Chris Evans, playing the bright eyed and somewhat straight arrow detective was a great foil to play against Keanu’s confused dirty cop. I say confused because Keanu always plays his characters with a dose of befuddlement. From southern lawyer to English…whatever the fuck Jonathan Harker was…to dirty cop, Keanu always seems to not quite understand how he got the role, so he just seems to be going with it, and fuck me if I don’t love him for it. Oh, he will never win an Oscar, but he is always entertaining, that is what I pay to see. Keanu is dirty cop, you know, that cop that skirts on the dangerous edge to get the job done, not above planting evidence and shooting the occasional unarmed suspect in the name of true justice because the system is flawed and yada yada yada. You know this story, its dirty police force story, with dirty cop part of elite dirty squad headed by shady but charismatic leader (in this case Forrest Whitaker, being cool again and tapping some that Last King of Scotland insanity). Then there is by-the-book, out to get you I.A. officer (House’s Hugh Laurie) with new guy that might as well had “dead meat” tattooed on his forehead (Evans) with plot moving dead ex partner who found the conscious he dumped in the toilet, which lead to his aforementioned deadness (Cheeseburger Eddie…Terry Crews but Cheeseburger Eddie is a much better name). And once those pieces are in place, any viewer that has watched half a season of Law & Order or watched a cop movie in the last ten years knows what happens.
Street Kings was fun, lots of Keanu chewing through lines fun. He wasn’t the digital messiah and he wasn’t trying to butcher some accent, he was just California Guy, which he does fantastically well even though he isn’t a native. He’s cool, he’s fun, he inhabits dirty L.A. very well and I think, to date, this is one of his best characters. Like Kevin Costner, Keanu Reeves is a great actor when you put him in a particular role. The Matrix was a great example of the unsure warrior hero that must find the Way inside him, and there is only one Matrix movie, those two other…things were a completely different franchise that just stole the name. This time he is in the dirty cop family, specifically the dirty cop who is good, but does fucked up shit in the name of justice genus. His single-minded pursuit of justice for Cheeseburger Eddie’s demise has him pull roughshod over everyone, while crazy Last King has to keep him in check. He ends up shooting a lot of people, but its okay, they were fuckers. He approaches his world like the burnout, which has done all of the shitty stuff before so it’s so routine that it’s old hat. He is self destructive, single-minded, and sharp, and together entertains to no end. I love Keanu, especially in his worst roles; maybe I like watching his oddball style of acting/non-acting play out in different circumstances. He is inscrutable, and his talent and lack their of demonstrate themselves in the same movies to different people. Go see it and let me know what you think.
To date though, nothing surpasses Point Break, and nothing ever will.
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