Dark Blue

About halfway through this movie, I realized I hadn't blinked once. That's when I knew that I was watching a really good film. Kurt Russell is no slouch of an actor. He was riveting. This was a well crafted cop flick where everyone seems to have dirt on someone else, and meanwhile, there are crimes being committed, and L.A. is about to erupt in rioting.

The great thing about this flick is that it doesn't try to be more than it is. Which is just a very entertaining, suspenseful cop movie.

Well worth a watch.

Or two.

LAPD. For many years, Eldon Perry(Russell, giving a great deal of charm to a scumbag) has handled the streets the old-fashioned way, like he prefers to. But things might be changing soon. Arthur(Rhames, refreshingly not seeming like he could explode into violence at any point) wants to clean up the force. And it seems like it's just a matter of time.

This is pretty good as a companion piece to Training Day. In a few ways it is superior to that, in most ways, it is slightly inferior to it. The acting tends to be great. This is not an action movie. It's currently listed as being a crime-drama-thriller, which I agree with. With that said, there are a handful of tense and suspenseful scenes, and the climax is decent. It's cliched. The pacing is overall too slow, and is perhaps the main place where you can really see that Ron Shelton is not used to this kind of film. The fact that, despite fitting with the movies themes of corruption in law enforcement, ultimately the LA riots are background only, and that some of the depiction of the riots is problematic, is one element of this being exploitative.

This contains a little nudity and sexuality, and a bit of strong, bloody violence. I recommend it to big fans of Movies about crooked cops. 7/10

As the trial of the officers accused of beating Rodney King occurs in the background, LA sits on a knife's edge of tension. Meanwhile hard-line cop Eldon Perry celebrates his partner being cleared of operating outside of procedure and the pair go back to work. When they are put on a robbery homicide case all the evidence points to a couple of informants used by Captain Jack Van Meter, however he assures them it wasn't them and tells them to find someone else to pin it on. However Perry's partner Bobby Keough has a change of heart and the cracks start to show as LA bursts into flames.

This film was slightly over-hyped when it came out. I agree that it is a solid cop thriller that rises above recent offerings from the genre but to give it as much praise as it garnered at the time is to give it more than it deserves. The basic plot is on two levels. On the first level the film is about police corruption and sees a corrupt house of cards teetering on the brink of collapse. This bit works well and the cop thriller element works well even if it treads familiar ground. The second level is the background of the Rodney King trial and the LA riots. This aspect is very much wallpaper and I didn't really feel it was necessary for the main narrative to work. At best it complimented the ongoing tensions between community and cops, at worst it distracts from the main thrust.

Russell does give one of his strongest performances in recent years and is not afraid to be an unsympathetic lead character. However the rest of the cast are either not as good or not as well used. Speedman has to carry most of the moral weight of the film and it is clearly too heavy for him and can't do it convincingly. Rhames is simply not used very well and is almost supplementary to requirements. Gleeson is miscast - he is an able actor but the film required him to be a generation older than Perry, in reality they were the same age more or less. Michele is sexy and is reasonably well used for a support character and Kurupt is good even if he is playing the character that he plays daily in his rapper personae.

Overall this was a superior cop thriller that was enjoyable as same. It did a reasonable job looking at the real life issues of corruption in the LAPD but not as well as perhaps other reviews would have led you to believe - it is more a wallpaper or just a theme that is used to prop up the narrative rather than a real good historic look at the time.

Dark Blue was one of those movies I saw the trailer for back when it was first coming out in theaters that I had always wanted to see. For one reason or another I put it off and I eventually forgot about it. Over time some fellow film fans said this was worth watching and deserves a look. Kurt Russell's character is mean and lovable. He's a dirty cop, but we're with him every step of the way. There is a little bit of Training Day in this but one could argue Dark Blue is dirtier and angrier. This is not a typical character for Kurt Russell, and it's one of his best films from the past 10 years. I was surprised I hadn't seen this back when it came out. If you love Kurt, action films, and cop stories than Dark Blue is for you. Overall a good movie.

As far as stories about crooked cops go, this is one of the best I've ever seen. A dark, violent thriller set to the backdrop of the race riots in L.A. after the Rodney King verdict, written by David Ayer. Kurt Russell gives the performance of a lifetime and should at least have been nominated for an Oscar. Great and terribly underrated film. 8 stars out of 10.

In case you're interested in more underrated masterpieces, here's some of my favorites:

imdb.com/list/ls070242495