Leftbanker
This is an odd movie. I've seen it at least one time before, perhaps twice, yet I can't remember any details on this viewing. Kurt Russell is excellent in his role of the hardened veteran LA cop. The dialogue is sharp and to the point and not overly cliché for the genre.* Kurt Russell is among the ranks of actors who are like medieval guilds men, professionals and not too caught up in acting as an elite art form. He plays the gritty anti-hero in this perfectly, walking a tight rope of swaggering tough guy and someone working for the public good, which is more than you can say for his thoroughly corrupt superiors.James Eroy takes us into the now very familiar underbelly of the Los Angeles Police Department, this time on the verge of the acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King to within an inch of his life. Russell's character, Eldon Perry explains that the reason the police went overboard on King was because they were denied the right to use a choke-hold on suspects. Pretty lame reasoning as the video pretty clearing shows that King wasn't resisting and there were a whole lot of racist cops hammering on him.So why don't I remember much about this movie after watching it at least once before? Compare it to Street Kings. In Dark Blue there are really no iconic action scenes like we have at the opening of Street Kings in which Keanu Reeves takes out the Asian porn gang or whatever they were.*Not being a cliché is hard to pull off as most cop movies sound exactly the same. They should give s workshop for would-be screen writers on how not to sound like that last 50 cop movies made. My guess is that the people writing most of these films do nothing but watch movies and never, ever read books.
moderniste
I was kind of shocked into submission by "Dark Blue". The movie doesn't slow down from minute 1 and it's not a short film, so that edge of your seat adrenaline might seem to fade, but it didn't for me--all the way to the awesome Kurrupt remix of a Porno for Pyros track during the credits. That song was so right on for the overall theme of the film that it got me off the couch to write this review.This was the rare cop movie with very few scenes, if any, of gratuitous violence, though the film is very violent and angry. The filming of the LA riot scenes were chilling--because I was actually in LA during them and saw some crazy stuff. Whomever set up the sets for those shots had to have been there--the sheer chaos and random, explosive aggression out of nowhere was intimately captured. Scary stuff.Kurt Russell has played so many cops that you almost think that he'd be uncastable at this point. This is not the case. This is the darkest, and most tortured I've ever seen him, and it's because his character is truly complex, and not all a bad guy. You are appalled at what he does, and yet root for him because he has an essential goodness in him that he painfully and tragically redeems at the film's end.Another masterful LA movie in the same pantheon, though perhaps maybe one or two steps down from "LA Confidential" and the king of them all, "Chinatown".
Spikeopath
Dark Blue is directed by Ron Shelton and written by David Ayer from a story by James Ellroy. It stars Kurt Russell, Scott Speedman, Michael Michele, Brendan Gleeson and Ving Rhames. Story is set in the run up to the Rodney King ignited riots in Los Angeles. LAPD officer Eldon Perry (Russell) is as tough as they come, he believes that it's OK to bend the rules if it means putting a bad guy away. But bending rules leaves a trail, a trail that leads to more corrupt cops than himself. So as he and his fresh faced partner Bobby Keough (Speedman) continue to come under intense suspicion from Assistant Chief Arthur Holland (Rhames), Perry's life is suddenly at risk; just as the city is about to explode.It's been said many times before, so I'll get it out of the way now. Dark Blue is very similar to Training Day (2001), the dirty cop based movie that bagged Denzel Washington another Oscar. What is forgotten or not known, is that Dark Blue was shot before Training Day. Written by the same writer, Ayer, Dark Blue sat on the shelf for nearly three years at studio HQ whilst the suits wondered what to do with the film. Of course, dirty cop film's have been many over the years, but both this and Denzel's movie are from the upper echelon's of the crime sub-genre, it wouldn't have hurt to have had two similar film's out in a short space of time, how many times have we seen it happen before? What it amounts to in the grand scheme of things for Dark Blue, is that it's unfairly seen as the inferior copy of Training Day. Wrong, because Dark Blue is the better movie.Opening with the infamous camcorder footage of white coppers beating the tar out of motorist Rodney King, Dark Blue sets a gritty tone from the off. From here we find our characters thrust into a city on the edge of chaos, chaos fuelled by the lead character of the piece. The link between Eldon Perry and the impending riots is key, Perry might not have been one of the actual coppers who lay down that beating on King, but it's his actions, and how he enforces the law, that forms the basis of badness that is inherent in this particular police force. The smart thing here in Ayer and Ellroy's story is that Perry is not a loose cannon egotist, he's a measured third generation cop, following in family footsteps and adhering to management policy above him. His family life is also very revealing, the makers including this arc in the film proves to be a very good move.Along side him is young Bobby, desperate to get on and be a name in the force, he's troubled greatly by Perry's (and his superiors) way of doing things. But is this the way it should be? Bad guys are bad guys, right? It's a neat vein in the narrative thread, one cop who presumes he's right in his actions, the other who hopes that his partner is right in his actions. Pitted against them is the restrained Assistant Chief Arthur Holland, driven by good, but tainted by a past indiscretion, he casts an imposing shadow over the corruption he knows exists around him. They are all well drawn characters, and with a punchy script at work, there's an air of authenticity about the movie. It may be treading a well worn genre path in basis, but it rises above most others because it doesn't soft soap its subject.That it works so well is primarily down to a towering performance from Russell. Playing Perry as fearsome and loathsome, Russell doesn't call for any sympathy: that is until he's asked to by the nature of the story. It's only after the film has finished that you realise he's given a three tiered turn, each one as believable as it is magnetic. Unfortunately Speedman is just too wet, underplaying it too much alongside Russell to the point that when he's called on for some dramatic thrust it comes off as second rate. Rhames is wonderfully sedate, while Gleeson (as always) holds his scenes with an assuredness, a presence, that few newer actors can match. Kudos, too, to Lolita Davidovich as Perry's wife, Sally. In a film that's thriving on machoness and violence, Davidovich brings a tenderness to her scenes with Russell, and it never once feels out of place.With a stronger story than Training Day, and arguably a better lead performance, Dark Blue deserves more respect and a bigger audience. It has the odd problem, such as the afore mentioned Speedman and the inevitable contrivances entering the home straight, but this is a tough nitty gritty thriller that's recommended with confidence to adult cinema fans. 8/10
