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.
