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80"Kings" covers familiar territory but does so with ruthless efficiency, intense performances and a densely packed plot designed to highlight the moral issues that most concern Ayer and Ellroy.
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After its clichéd first scene - a solo LAPD officer battling a well-armed gang of thugs - Street Kings becomes an enjoyably tough, blood-splattered action drama that revolves around the one good cop at its center.
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80A brutal look at police corruption that allows director David Ayer and "L.A. Confidential" author James Ellroy to pool their deeply cynical insights.
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75There's a lot to appreciate in Street Kings, a tight, propulsive action thriller, but there's one thing to marvel at, and that's James Ellroy's command of story.
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70It'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.
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70Armed or not, Reeves is the weapon that can go off at any time. That's why 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."
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67A solid contemporary crime drama.
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63The picture may feel more than a little familiar, but Ayer knows how to cook up intense setpieces, and Reeves keeps getting better at the weary hero role he continually gravitates toward.
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63A wet, red chunk of pulp that knows what it is and doesn't care.
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63Street Kings is nonsense, and yet the crooked, racialized world underneath the soulless mayhem is pretty fascinating.
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63Despite 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.
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63If you're looking for some big, stupid fun, you could do worse than Street Kings.
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60Another mean, violent and decently acted slab of Ellroy-flavoured criminality, with an impressively battered Keanu Reeves, but Ayers is no Curtis Hanson.
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58Every so often, Keanu Reeves' robo-voiced blankness serves him well, but when he has to play a pulpy, tormented demon-saint, scraping up insults and spitting them out like bullets, he's like the host of an infomercial doing an impersonation of a badass.
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58For what's essentially a bad movie, Street Kings is fairly tight and energetic.
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58It's hard to recall another time when the cross-purposes of two collaborating filmmakers of a major film has been quite so evident, or when the theme of the movie itself has been so totally schizophrenic -- half populist outrage, half Nazi.
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58See it with people who take it for the trash it is, and you can cheer the baroque killings and laugh fondly with Forest Whitaker as he tries too hard to create a domestic sociopath to match his role as "Idi Amin."
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58After all the actorly fireworks, Street Kings concludes that the LAPD is an institution where even the well-intentioned can't work clean. Okay. What else?
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50The acting? Common and the Game score as baddies, but Hugh Laurie as an acid-tongued internal-affairs cop is disappointingly just House without the limp.
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50I enjoyed parts of Street Kings but I didn't believe one thing about it, and I couldn't get past Reeves' unsuitability to his role. He may someday play a cop on the edge convincingly, but the edge needs to be sharper than this.
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50There are two kinds of police officers in David Ayers and James Ellroy's convoluted, ultraviolent tale of corruption within the LAPD: dirty cops and dirtier ones.
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50A bad-cop, worse-cop movie.
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Ayer's grim police thriller mostly plays as one long dick-measuring competition. 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.
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50There's something cynical about Ayer's attempt to preserve Ludlow as a hero after scene upon scene meant to show, with heavy irony, how lawlessly he enforced the law. You can't lionize your "Dirty Harry" vigilante and expose his hypocrisy, too.
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50It preserves the peculiar machismo of Ayer's earlier projects: the alpha male dominates not only because he's the most powerful, but because he's the most jaded.
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40All the movie's treacheries, deceptions and story twists are marred by our lack of innocence. 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.
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38Wastes a moderately intriguing premise by filling it with laughably clichéd dialogue, one-dimensional characters and implausible turns of events.
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30Two things come to mind as you watch the first act of Street Kings, the first is how fresh and exciting the movie would've been if it was released in 1984, the second is the question, "James Ellroy wrote that?"
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 25 out of 27
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Mixed: 1 out of 27
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Negative: 1 out of 27
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