The good news: Despite obvious similarities, Street Kings is not Training Day 2.0. The bad news: Street Kings is nowhere near as good as Training Day. While each features cops gone wild amid rampant corruption, drugs, and bullets, a key ingredient is missing this time around: intelligence.
We meet LAPD Detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) as his alarm clock beeps for the wake-up call. He pops off his gold rings, washes his face, and cleans and oils his sidearm. The Los Angeles sun is already setting when Ludlow makes his first stop of the night, picking up several "airplane-sized bottles of vodka" from the local convenience store. He then proceeds on his policeman business; that is, spouting racial slurs to catch the ire of a couple Korean gangbangers, who then inadvertently lead him to their hideout. Without phoning in backup, Ludlow unloads several clips into the Korean thugs and saves two kidnapped girls from further videotaped rape.
This isn't routine police procedure, and cops don't do this kind of cowboy thing in real life. But Street Kings isn't about real life, and we don't expect it to be. It's about messed-up cops doing messed-up things, without any concept of laws or collateral or anything else that would slow a thriller's momentum down. Race, greed, and conspiracy are all taken into account in much the same way that they are in L.A. Confidential, which was written by this film's co-writer, James Ellroy.
L.A. Confidential this ain't, of course, and as already explained, neither is it Training Day - which, if to add further layers of behind-the-scenes connections, was directed by David Ayer. Those other films portray their cop worlds with originality and equal parts cynicism and criticism, whereas here Ayer is more interested in moving from point A to point B and ultimately toward a horribly expositional point C.
Ludlow's a vice squad veteran, whose captain, Jack Wander (an overly charismatic Forest Whitaker), keeps him out of trouble when he heads off the deep end - such as with the case of the Korean thugs and the kidnapped girls. Ludlow's policy isn't so much shoot first and talk second, but rather shoot first and then lie about it in the paperwork.
