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DARK
BLUE Rating:   Director: Ron Shelton Writer: David Ayer Producers: David Blocher, Caldecott Chubb, Sean Daniel, James Jacks Director of Photography: Barry Peterson Cast: Kurt Russell, Scott Speedman, Ving Rhames, Brendan Gleeson Visit the IMDB page for full cast and crew |
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Review by: Ryan
Kugler
2/17/03
Though not quite as shocking as both David Lynch and David Mamet delivering G-rated films in the same year, watching something by Ron Shelton that has nothing to do with sports comes pretty damn close. I've enjoyed Shelton's work in the past, but the guy has only ever made films set against the backdrop of baseball (Bull Durham & Cobb), basketball (White Men Can't Jump), golf (Tin Cup) and boxing (the dreadful Play it to the Bone). If I hadn't known any better I would have thought that the title Dark Blue referred to the color of a football team's jersey. All kidding aside, it was with great curiosity that I entered his Los Angeles cop drama, which is played out against the 1992 riots.
The film opens with footage that we're all familiar with and it's just as shocking and powerful as I remember it being. Yes, I'm talking about the infamous Rodney King video. We then jump ahead to the trials of the Los Angeles police officers involved in the beating. Watching from the safety of his home, as the verdicts are about to be read, is Sgt. Eldon Perry (Kurt Russell). It's at this moment (before the reading of the verdicts) that the film jumps back in time to reveal how Perry ended up in the uneasy frame-of-mind that he appears to be in.
The story proper opens with a brutal scene, (which reminded me of the one that opened the great Menace II Society) as two youths enter a liquor store and lay waste to its inhabitants. Who these guys are, and what their motive for committing such a heinous crime was, is the mystery at the center of this LA story.
Perry and his younger partner Bobby Keough (Scott Speedman), both of whom are being investigated by Deputy Chief Arthur Holland (Ving Rhames in what amounts to an extended cameo) for police misconduct, are given this important assignment by their superior Jack Van Meter (a slimy Brendan Gleeson). Perry and Keough hit the streets to find their suspects all the while they are dealing with their significant others, fronting for a corrupt boss and dodging Chief Holland, in the days leading up to the moment that Los Angeles burns.
Sounds good on paper, but Dark Blue is really nothing more than a routine B-level action movie. The Rodney King beating and the riots that ensued are an important part of our modern history and a serious movie deserves to be made about it, but this is not that movie. It's just too unconvincing, too silly and too over-the-top to be truly effective.
What the film does have is a nice, gritty look and feel and some solid performances, with Russell especially convincing in his portrayal of a tough cop who has gone astray. He gives a great speech at the end (you know, one of those speeches where he implicates the real mastermind behind everything) that makes the audience want to stand and cheer, but it takes a lot of generic sequences of typical "police stuff" to get to this high point. I also found the recreation of the riots (during the final half-hour) to be especially intense, but nothing is as effective as watching the real footage on the nightly news, as I did eleven years ago.
In the end, it's nice to see Shelton branching out and working in a different genre, but it's time for him to get back to what he does best. Unfortunately, a search at IMDB reveals that he's currently working on Hollywood Homicide, which is (you guessed it) an LA cop movie.
(A United Artists' release. Opens wide on February 21, 2003.)
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