James Ellroy's name on the credits as one of the screenwriters of "Street Kings" prepares the viewer for the excess that pervades the movie. The highly successful and highly overrated novelist positively wallows in brutality and bloodshed in all of his fiction, a practice that the new film continues with remarkable fidelity to his vision. Presumably because of his efforts it takes the cop flick to another level of violence, ultimately erasing the putative distinction between policemen and criminals.

Set in Los Angeles, like most cop flicks, the picture begins with Detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) attempting to sell a machine gun to a couple of Korean thugs, a scheme that goes terribly wrong when he insults them, apparently intentionally, provoking a vicious beating and the theft of his car, machine gun and all. Without an iota of explanation or logic, he tracks them down, arms himself, bursts into their house, and kills them and their colleagues, rescuing a pair of young women they had kidnapped.

That opening sequence establishes the tone and content of the rest of the movie, which mostly consists of the protagonist encountering dangerous situations, which call for him to beat and/or shoot a considerable number of people. Supported by his supervisor, Captain Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker), and admired by his fellow cops, Ludlow piques the interest of his department's Internal Affairs investigators, who believe, with some reason, that he operates outside the normal guidelines of police work. He tends to shoot first and warn his targets later, then with the help of Captain Wander, creates barely plausible cover stories for the consumption of the media.

The central moment of the film involves a confusion of motives and identities. Believing that a former partner intends to report him to the Internal Affairs detectives, Ludlow follows him, but stumbles into a shootout that kills the partner. When he tries to track down the killers, his captain and his colleagues obstruct his investigation, while the Internal Affairs officers believe he committed the murder.

For the rest of the movie Ludlow operates unofficially, enlisting another detective in his attempts to find out who shot his partner and why his squad wants to cover it all up. In keeping with James Ellroy's world view, he discovers a culture of corruption that pollutes just about everybody on the police force, from his squad all the way up to the chief, and apparently taints the highest levels of city government. He also discovers an ethical ambiguity he had never known beneath the surface of his own career, a disturbing lesson in the complexity of actions that initially seemed clear and simple.

After almost a dozen cops have revealed their complicity in evil and pretty much killed each other, "Street Kings" ends with its final frames soaked in blood and littered with corpses. An unusual, impassioned speech by Ludlow's commanding officer moves the film into a dimension suggesting something very like an Elizabethan or Jacobean tragedy, drenched in gore and shrouded in a moral darkness. Believing that he and Ludlow constitute a sort of royal family, Wander argues against any belief in the absolutes of good or evil and justifies with some eloquence all the treachery, revenge, and bloodshed that he orchestrates.

Despite an ostensibly simple plot based almost entirely on a series of shootouts, the picture hints at but never develops a back story accounting for some of Ludlow's propensity for violence. As the bullets spray all over the scenery and ventilate a score of actors, it also grows increasingly implausible, another Ellroy specialty. Although his adversaries equip themselves with a large and lethal array of armament, which they use with abandon, Ludlow dispatches them all without suffering more than a few cuts and bruises or a modicum of remorse.

Keanu Reeves' hollow voice and pale, frozen countenance somehow separate him from all the violent action and melodramatic emotion, so that he navigates through all the action without betraying an iota of affect. He may make Dirty Harry look like Mother Teresa, but he also makes the Sphinx seem quite animated; finally, he often seems deader than all the bodies he leaves in his wake, which describes the movie as well. 

Street Kings

(R), directed by David Ayer

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