Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Aspect Ratio: 2.40:1 Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Binding: DVD Brand: STREET KINGS (DVD MOVIE) EAN: 0024543526094 Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC Label: 20th Century Fox Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox Number Of Items: 1 Publisher: 20th Century Fox Region Code: 1 Release Date: August 19, 2008 Running Time: 109 minutes Sales Rank: 207 Studio: 20th Century Fox Theatrical Release Date: April 11, 2008
Product Description: Gripping performances by Keanu Reeves Academy Award® Winner Forest Whitaker* and an all-star supporting cast power this action-packed crime thriller in which a veteran cop finds himself ensnared in a deadly web of conspiracy and betrayal. Reeves stars as Tom Ludlow a hard-nosed detective with a talent for delivering brutal street justice. When evidence implicates him in the murder of a fellow officer the violence around Ludlow explodes as he realizes his own life is in danger and he can trust no one.System Requirements:Running Time: 100 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE/CRIME Rating: R UPC: 024543526094 Manufacturer No: 2252609
Amazon.com: Street Kings is a pungent bouquet of corruption, violence, multi-ethnic mayhem, macho glee laced with macho angst, and fluorescently obscene dialogue from the mind of James Ellroy. Its hero, though he'd scarcely consent to be called one, is L.A. police detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves), for whom life is a wound that won't heal and dealing out retribution to scumbags is the ongoing treatment. Ludlow's the star player--'the tip of the [expletive] spear'--on a team of detectives headed by Capt. Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker). Coach Wander relies on his boys to keep breaking lurid cases, usually through deeply darkside underground work, and raising his profile with the media and the department. In pursuit of these goals, nothing is forbidden except failure, and the truth is what you make it look like. This is familiar Ellroy territory, most effectively translated to the screen in L.A. Confidential (which should have won the 1997 Oscar, and would have if Titanic hadn't launched that year). If you know Ellroy's ground game, you can pretty much guess where Street Kings is going, and where it's been. Still, the twists and torques of its urban road-rage course maintain the centrifugal force needed to hold us in our seats (a tactical highlight: refrigerator adapted as rolling barricade), and the movie keeps bopping us with oddball casting coups: comic Jay Mohr and Northern Exposure/Sex and the City veteran John Corbett as two members of Coach Warden's gonzo detective squad; Cedric the Entertainer doing a nicely nuanced turn as a street creature; Hugh Laurie doing a less-hyper version of House, if House worked Internal Affairs.
The problem is that director David Ayer keeps everything intense. Dialogues are shot too close-up, line readings are too strident, the action is too nonstop slam. Recall Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential and the mind's eye summons up a whole spectrum of existence, mood, place, historical period, emotional investment; there's an amplitude to the picture and the sensibility bringing it to us, something besides the whodunit and the endless rap sheet of nasty what-they-done. Everything in Street Kings is one-note, and with Keanu Reeves playing it implosive and Forest Whitaker locked in crazier-than-an-outhouse-rat mode, that's no way to stay the course. --Richard T. Jameson
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Rating: - A Fast-Paced, Far Too Simplistic Version of Training Day...
High intensity cop dramas have long been a staple of Hollywood films, most of them set out to show that police officers are here to protect us (which most are); but, lately it seems that these types of films have shifted somewhat in their approach to cops. No longer are all police officers in the movies out to protect and serve the communities, now it seems that most movie cops are out only for themselves and a bigger piece of financial pie which they will take any way they can get it. A few years ago, one highly praised film focused on these morally challenged police officers with such explosiveness and realism that audiences couldn't help but notice this changing trend in Hollywood's police dramas. The film I'm referring to would be director Antoine Fuqua's incredibly intense and suspenseful, critically acclaimed movie "Training Day". Fast forward a little more to the present day, and we have ourselves yet another ... Read More
Rating: - A modern day "Serpico",
"Street Kings" is incredibly entertaining with a great cast, terrific direction, amazing sound and more plot twists than the Pikes Peak Highway has switchbacks.
A solid rental and maybe a keeper...
Rating: - Missing Special Features
I was excited about this movie, because Ayer had written two of my favorite movies Dark Blue and Training Day. I wasn't disappointed in the movie.
However, you should note that although the box lists the following special features: Audio commentary with Ayer; Street Rules: Rolling with Ayer and Fitzsimmons; La Bete Noir: Writing Street Kings; Street Cred; Deleted scenes with optional commentary; Alternate takes; vignettes; and Behind the Scenes Clips, the only Special Feature is the audio commentary. The other features although listed (per Fox who I emailed about this) are only on the Special Edition version. The packaging of the disks would lead a consumer to believe that the only additional feature on the Special Edition is a digital copy. As most of you know, once a DVD is opened it cannot be returned. So BOO on fox for the bait and switch on what is otherwise a worthwhile product.
Rating: - COPS AS KINGS
There are movies galore that focus on the role of police in society. For the most part, early films portrayed them as pillars of the community, citizens with badges that children and adults alike could admire and trust. In the early seventies all of that changed. Corrupt policemen in New York became the cause du jour and the film SERPICO portrayed cops as people who would turn a blind eye when a bribe was offered. That characterization continued in films through TRAINING DAY in 2001. The writer for that film, David Ayers, returns to the men in blue with STREET KINGS.
Keannu Reeves is Det. Tom Ludlow, a man on the outs having lost his wife and part of an elite task force that takes to the streets of LA in pursuit of the worst the world has to offer. The team Tom works with is headed by Capt. Jack Wander (Forrest Whitaker), an up and coming official with his sites set on the chief's position. Tom and his fellow ... Read More
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- A Fast-Paced, Far Too Simplistic Version of Training Day...
