Street Kings: Critic Reviews

The structure is in place -- the latticework of corruption -- only there are so many scurrilous men pulling strings that we might be watching a parade of nasty puppets, with Keanu as the chief wooden devil doll.

Street Kings is an absurd if accidentally entertaining potboiler, based on a story by James Ellroy.

There's plenty of empty bravura, and Reeves is fundamentally blank and uninteresting.

Street Kings wastes a moderately intriguing premise by filling it with laughably cliched dialogue, one-dimensional characters and implausible turns of events.

We see the big picture way before the characters do, and that pushes us right out of the movie and back into our seats -- the last place we want to be.

[Director] Ayer appears to like the thrill of violence more than its philosophical underpinnings, so the movie is caught between the silly and the profound.

After its cliched first scene Street Kings becomes an enjoyably tough, blood-splattered action drama that revolves around the one good cop at its center.

Street Kings is the cinematic equivalent of solid crime-genre fiction. It keeps the visual pages turning for a couple hours and navigates the dark corners of corruption and dishonor among men.

Street Kings has hints of Training Day and the subtle aroma of L.A. Confidential, two movies concerned with the moral ambiguity and compromised honor of L.A.'s finest.

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.

In Ellroy's original scenario Street Kings was a period piece, set in the 1990s just after the Rodney King riots. I wonder if it would've made more sense that way.

Another 'roid-raging dirty cop drama from David Ayer.

Much of the casting is dead-on, from Cedric the Entertainer as a street dealer to Jay Mohr as a slimy cop and Chris Evans as an earnest rookie who saddles up with Reeves' Ludlow for an ill-fated ride.

Street Kings wobbles increasingly as it runs along, beginning well, growing so-so and culminating in a preposterous here's-what-it-all-means confession by the main villain.

If you've seen Training Day, you've seen Street Kings done better.

James Ellroy wrote the script; he also wrote the novel on which L.A. Confidential was based. If you're hoping for a similar intelligence, you're out of luck.

Pic itself is similarly conflicted, glamorizing gunslinging while crying foul over unnecessary force.

Like director David Ayer's previous movies (he wrote Training Day), Street Kings is about the joy of badass coppery.

Keanu Reeves tries his best to channel Denzel and Clint in Street Kings, a wild and woolly if also slack and silly bad-cops-kill-other-bad-cops thriller.

The movie belongs to Reeves, who at 43 is finally starting to look like an adult, with greater heft all round. He does Clint proud.

That Ellroy delivers a crude, undistinguished script here is a pity.

There's something cynical about Ayers' attempt to preserve Ludlow as a hero after scene upon scene meant to show, with heavy irony, how lawlessly he enforced the law.

Despite the predictability of the overall story arc, there's suspense and tension to be found between the credit sequences, but the movie is saddled with an ending that is both improbable and borderline insulting.

Fast action combined with rock-solid characters.

The cliches and laughably hammy dialogue are scattered about just as liberally as the spent bullet casings in Street Kings.