Street Kings (2008)

David Ayer's Street Kings arrives from 2008, a year when the LAPD corruption procedural still had a pulse and Keanu Reeves still had a willingness to be beaten about the face for our entertainment. Reeves plays Tom Ludlow, an alcoholic vice detective who stages shootings, falsifies evidence, and mourns his dead wife in the time-honored manner of men who own only one suit. Forest Whitaker chews the scenery as Captain Wander, a man whose ambitions extend from chief of police to mayor and whose blackmail documents live inside his walls like a particularly aggressive form of insulation. The film is grim, efficient, and entirely uninterested in telling us what to think.

On the matter of social consciousness, the picture is a relic of a simpler dispensation. The cast is notably multiethnic, with Whitaker, Naomie Harris, Common, Cedric the Entertainer and Martha Higareda filling out a Los Angeles that looks like Los Angeles, though the demographics are backdrop for a corruption plot and nothing more. Race is never examined. Women appear as widows and rescued captives, which is to say they appear briefly and then stop appearing. There is no environmental messaging, no body-positivity framework, no mental-health affirmation around Ludlow's drinking, which the film treats as a flaw and a plot device instead of a condition deserving of our compassion.

What remains is a neo-noir that shows rather than preaches, and shows a great deal of gunfire. Its critique of police power is personal and cynical, aimed at one captain's appetite for promotion, not at any economic system. It carries no sermon, no lesson, no invitation to examine our own complicity. One might call that a failure of ambition. The film would probably call it a Tuesday. It is a modest, ugly, competent piece of work, and it asks nothing of us but our attention, which is more than most of its contemporaries can honestly claim.