It’s the spring of 1992 and the city of Los Angeles seethes with anger, hatred and hostility. A young black truck driver named Rodney King has been brutally beaten to within an inch of his life by four white police officers. Those officers are now sitting in a Simi Valley courtroom five days shy of the verdict that will render them innocent of police brutality, and set the stage for the simmering resentments that have plagued an impoverished neighborhood to explode, violently and tragically, to the surface.
This festering cauldron of antipathy, a world where racial and class differences turn into violent orgies of frustration and destruction, is the major setting for “Dark Blue,” a routine, if at times effective, corrupt cop drama. Thank goodness too, as the setting amps up the tension in a movie that would’ve seemed more like a tired struggle than a riveting drama.
Does this sound familiar? Older, experienced police detective working the mean streets of Los Angeles walks a morally suspect line when it comes to his job. He mentors a young rookie in the art of corruption, teaching him lessons on a cop’s survival in the grungiest parts of the town – namely the willingness to do anything, to bend (or break) any rule to get the job done.
It should sound familiar. It sounds exactly like “Training Day” and that’s hardly a surprise, seeing how “Training Day” author David Ayer also scripted “Dark Blue,” which was based on a story by modern-noir specialist James Ellroy (entitled “The Plague Season”). The movie, despite taking pathways through old material, retains a raw power towards its subject. Ayer has a gift for writing naturalistic dialogue; the words here have the poetry of real life attached to them. Ayer writes the way people speak, avoiding overly hard-boiled and/or cinematic dialogue that sounds as though it has been processed through the screenwriter’s handbook.
In “Dark Blue,” Kurt Russell gets to bite into one of the juiciest roles of his career as Eldon Perry, Jr., a veteran cop who comes from a long line of LAPD detectives. Perry is a dirty cop, a man with a history of murders to his credit and a willingness to cross whatever line he needs to fulfill his duties as an upholder of the law – although his tactics put him down to the level of the criminals he is sworn to bust.
Russell gives one of his best, grittiest performances in awhile, since at least his performance in “The Thing.” He makes Perry a man who’s at once vicious and pathetic, a man who thinks he rules the streets but is only a lapdog for his bosses. Perry’s boss, Jack Van Meter (Brendan Gleeson, in a fine, ferocious turn made with a scalding mix of racism, paternalism and apathy), is even more corrupt than Perry. When Perry discovers that the prime suspects in a brutal mass murder at a Korean market are a couple of Van Meter’s prized snitches, Perry is ordered to pin it on two anonymous low-level scum.
Russell deftly captures Perry’s moral ambiguities, the cop’s allegiance to the force at all costs as well as the psychic toll his actions have cost him and his family. Regret slowly creeps into the cop’s tough-guy exterior, first as he sees his family life crumble into divorce and alcoholism, and then as he sees how badly the life has gotten to his new young partner Bobby Keough (Scott Speedman), who has been forced to perform his own cold-blooded murder under Perry’s tutelage.
Keough, meanwhile, is involved with a black sergeant (Michael Michelle) who doesn’t like to reveal her last name or the precinct where she works. The sergeant is assistant and ex-lover to Chief Holland (a commanding Ving Rhames), an ambitious, do-right man who turns down a chance to lead the Cleveland police squad in order to take a chance at becoming L.A.’s first black head chief and root out corruption in Perry’s SIS unit. Tensions come to a head as the Rodney King verdicts come in, and trouble boils over in South Central.
If this sounds a bit overloaded, it is. Ayer and director Ron Shelton (a long way from his sports film surroundings, he is doing as good a job as he can) pile on the story threads until the movie begins to sag under itself. This may be a rare case of one movie having too much characterization and plot details; the two-hour running time is not enough time for Ayer and Shelton to cover all their bases. “Dark Blue” has some visceral impact, but it’s also sloppy and unfocused. Indeed, the only-in-the-movies coincidences cut the movie off from the realism it aims for and only intermittently succeeds at finding. The individual pieces here get short shrift when jammed so close against each other, allowing the movie to wobble and shudder whenever it careens from one plot point to another. Shelton should have trimmed either the family subplots to make for a leaner, sharper thriller, or avoided procedural elements to craft a searing character portrait of a man haunted by his dark actions. Instead, what Shelton winds up with is a film that is neither here nor there.
“Dark Blue” lacks the propulsive, kinetic punch of “Narc” and the steely grit of “Training Day.” It takes a well-traveled road through well-traveled terrain, and piles on too much to build momentum. The L.A. riot backdrop lends the movie a much needed tension, and the explosive climax as Perry drives through the angry, roiling crowds in pursuit of suspects has a snapping verve…until it forces Russell to grandstand in a time honored cinematic fashion more suited to an Al Pacino movie. There’s some good stuff in “Dark Blue,” but its hidden in a thicket of unoriginality and lost opportunities.
