The engaging yet conventional Street Kings is the most offensive sort of movie — a film that telegraphs every detail down to the tiniest nuance, yet still doesn’t trust its audience to have the necessary intelligence to keep up. The film spends two hours unraveling a mystery that anyone with half a brain figured out mere minutes into the first act.

Taking a page from “The Shield,” Street Kings is another in a long line of recent vigilante films, differing only in the fact that these self-appointed crusaders bleed blue. Keanu Reeves plays Tom Ludlow, a veteran LAPD Vice Detective who belongs to a wholly unauthorized unit dedicated to cowboy vigilantism. When bureaucratic red tape or pesky courts stand in the way of justice, Ludlow and his team simply assassinate the offenders and doctor the official logbooks.

Ludlow carries out his job with ruthless efficiency. But he is also a hair’s breadth away from an emotional meltdown, lately finding himself grappling with the demons of having crossed the line between good and evil without ever once looking back.

When his partner is brutally gunned down, Ludlow makes it his mission in life to find the killers, despite the fact that his boss, Captain Wander (Forest Whitaker), has ordered him to lay low. Internal Affairs is getting suspicious and Captain Biggs (Hugh Laurie) smells blood in the water. Ignoring his orders and his own better judgment, Ludlow teams up with a young homicide detective (Chris Evans) and pursues leads through the darkest corners of Los Angeles. What he discovers ultimately forces Ludlow to question the loyalty of everyone around him and the very culture he serves.

Is Ludlow a hero or a villain? Who is worse, the criminals or the police? Deeply cynical, Street Kings is flush with moral ambiguity, echoing scenes from A Few Good Men in which Jack Nicholson sermonizes as to why men like him are a necessary evil. “Who else is gonna hold back the animals?” this movie asks.

Street Kings was helmed by David Ayer, a green director who is best known as the screenwriter for a slew of gritty, urban police thrillers including Training Day. Ayer’s direction here is operatic, fueled by pure adrenaline and imbued with a raw, coarse style.

This time around, Ayer leaves the writing to veteran James Ellroy, the man responsible for penning the blistering L.A. Confidential. Ellroy’s word construction is nearly unassailable — he crafts dialogue here as brutal as it is sporadically beautiful. But it is Ellroy’s overarching story that is indefensible, an utterly transparent plot in which our befuddled protagonist desperately tries to get to the bottom of a mystery that should be as obvious to him as it is to the viewer. Since we already know how the plot will resolve itself, we stick around only for the promise of titillating violence.

Reeves doesn’t help matters. He is simply not a skilled enough actor to convey the sort of depth and nuance necessary to allow us to truly sympathize with a man caught in the contradiction of upholding the law even while blatantly casting it aside.

© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.