Street Kings

Director David Ayer makes a gritty follow-up to his first film "Harsh Times" with an equally cynical impression of armed authority figures. Based on James Ellroy’s novel, "Street Kings" is set in LA’s blood-soaked streets, traversed by widowed LAPD veteran Detective Tom Ludlow (played by Keanu Reeves) whose carte blanche methods of obliterating suspects with his service revolver are threatened when his former partner Terrence Washington turns Internal Affairs informant. Accustomed to having his violent "missions" smoothed over with the help of Captain Wander (played by Forest Whitaker), Tom thumbs his nose at the encircling IA officers, in order to find the gunmen responsible for shooting Washington down during a convenience store heist. A combination of implausible plot-points, and the miscasting of television’s Hugh Laurie as Internal Affairs chief Captain Biggs, hampers a convoluted crime thriller that is nonetheless entertaining for its grotesque action sequences.

Rated R, 107 mins. (B-)