February
21, 2003 | Largely because so many things go wrong - stunningly,
breathtakingly wrong - throughout so much of Dark Blue, the movie
winds up being, somewhat like a spectacular auto wreck, perversely fascinating.
Unfortunately,
on those rare occasions when some element of this overheated melodrama
actually clicks - that is, when a plot development generates genuine
suspense, or a performance briefly rings true - it seems, in the context
of such rampant ineptitude, like an accident, or maybe even a mistake.
Dark
Blue was written by David Ayer, the same fellow who scripted Training
Day, and based on an original scenario by L.A. Confidential
author James Ellroy. So it likely won't surprise you to learn that it
is a brutal, cynical and purposefully sensational drama about tainted
cops, systemic corruption and morally compromised, not-so-innocent bystanders.
Trouble is, you just as likely won't be surprised by anything else in
the movie, which appears to have been assembled from bits and pieces
of similar, much better bad cop/worse cop stories.
Kurt
Russell stars as Eldon Perry, a third-generation LAPD cop who shoots
first - and second, then third - and never bothers to ask questions
later. It would be wildly inaccurate to describe him as the hero of
the piece, so let's just say he's the central character.
As
a veteran sergeant in his department's elite Special Investigations
Section, Perry knows where all of the bodies are buried, primarily because
he has buried most of them himself. He's a frankly racist, borderline-psychopathic
hard-ass who's eager to drag Bobby Keough (Scott Speedman), his younger
partner, down to his level. Even so, Russell works diligently - though
not entirely successfully - to convince us that Perry is a man with
at least some residue of a conscience, some vestigial capacity for self-awareness.
That's more than can be said for Perry's malevolent commander, Jack
Van Meter (Brendan Gleeson), a smooth-talking tyrant who relies on dutiful
underlings - and a few free-lance ex-cons - to do his dirty work.
When
two scummy druggies employed by Van Meter draw too much public attention
by leaving too many corpses at a seemingly random convenience-store
robbery, Van Meter orders Perry and Keough to clean up the mess. Specifically,
the commander wants the two cops to pin the murders on two other suspects
- and then slaughter those sacrificial lambs. Nothing good comes of
this.
As though desperately trying to disguise the second-hand nature of his
second-rate material, director Ron Shelton (Tin Cup, Bull Durham)
directs almost every scene at a level pitched somewhere between sputtering
outrage and shrieking hysteria.
Ving
Rhames dares to underplay as Arthur Holland, an ambitious deputy police
chief who's determined to bring down Van Meter. (It's tempting to assume
that Gleeson was cast as the bad guy simply because he's one of the
few actors alive who looks capable of intimidating Rhames.) But just
about everyone else in the cast - including Lolita Davidovich as Perry's
long-suffering wife and Michael Michelle as a curvy cop who falls for
Keough - follows Shelton's lead. While gamely struggling to invest the
overwrought dialogue with emotional truth, the actors often wind up
seeming laugh-out-loud silly.
It
doesn't help at all that Dark Blue unfolds during the days leading
to the 1992 riots that erupted in L.A. following the acquittal of four
LAPD cops charged with beating Rodney King. Evidently, the filmmakers
thought their lurid fiction would have greater resonance and relevance
while set against real-world events. But the rather puny melodrama in
the foreground tends to cheapen the larger issues and greater tragedies
that loom large in the background. There is no excuse for this.