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Street Kings
Fox Searchlight Pictures

Street Kings reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 55 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
7.5 out of 10
based on 28 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 35 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: R for strong violence and pervasive language

Starring Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker, Hugh Laurie, Terry Crews, Chris Evans, Cedric the Entertainer, Common, and The Game

In Street Kings, a police thriller directed by David Ayer, Keanu Reeves plays Tom Ludlow, a veteran LAPD Vice detective. Ludlow sets out on a quest to discover the killers of his former partner, Detective Terrance Washington. Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker plays Captain Wander, Ludlow's supervisor, whose duties include keeping him within the confines of the law and out of the clutches of Internal Affairs Captain Biggs (Hugh Laurie). Ludlow teams up with a young Robbery-Homicide detective (Chris Evans) to track Washington's killers through the diverse communities of Los Angeles. Their determination pays off when the two detectives track down Washington's murderers and confront them in an attempt to bring them to justice. (Fox Searchlight)


GENRE(S): Crime  |  Drama  |  Suspense/Thriller  
WRITTEN BY: James Ellroy
David Ayer
 
DIRECTED BY: David Ayer  
RELEASE DATE: Theatrical: April 11, 2008 
RUNNING TIME: 109 minutes, Color 
ORIGIN: USA 

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

80
The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
"Kings" covers familiar territory but does so with ruthless efficiency, intense performances and a densely packed plot designed to highlight the moral issues that most concern Ayer and Ellroy.
Read Full Review
80
Variety Peter Debruge
A brutal look at police corruption that allows director David Ayer and "L.A. Confidential" author James Ellroy to pool their deeply cynical insights.
Read Full Review
80
New York Daily News Joe Neumaier
After its clichéd first scene - a solo LAPD officer battling a well-armed gang of thugs - Street Kings becomes an enjoyably tough, blood-splattered action drama that revolves around the one good cop at its center.
Read Full Review
75
San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
There's a lot to appreciate in Street Kings, a tight, propulsive action thriller, but there's one thing to marvel at, and that's James Ellroy's command of story.
Read Full Review
70
Time Richard Corliss
Armed or not, Reeves is the weapon that can go off at any time. That's why Street Kings, though it isn't a great movie, is a pretty damn cool Keanu Reeves movie, one that on the Reevesian action scale measures somewhere between "Whoa" and "Wow."
Read Full Review
70
The New York Times Manohla Dargis
It’s easy to laugh at Street Kings for its bigger than big emotions, its preposterously kinky narrative turns and overwrought jawing and yowling, but there’s no doubt that it also keeps you watching, really watching, all the way to the end.
Read Full Review
67
Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
A solid contemporary crime drama.
Read Full Review
63
Premiere Jenni Miller
If you’re looking for some big, stupid fun, you could do worse than Street Kings.
Read Full Review
63
Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Street Kings is nonsense, and yet the crooked, racialized world underneath the soulless mayhem is pretty fascinating.
Read Full Review
63
Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
The picture may feel more than a little familiar, but Ayer knows how to cook up intense setpieces, and Reeves keeps getting better at the weary hero role he continually gravitates toward.
Read Full Review
63
ReelViews James Berardinelli
Despite the predictability of the overall story arc, there's suspense and tension to be found between the credit sequences, but the movie is saddled with an ending that is both improbable and borderline insulting.
Read Full Review
63
New York Post Kyle Smith
A wet, red chunk of pulp that knows what it is and doesn't care.
Read Full Review
60
Empire Ian Nathan
Another mean, violent and decently acted slab of Ellroy-flavoured criminality, with an impressively battered Keanu Reeves, but Ayers is no Curtis Hanson.
Read Full Review
58
Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
For what's essentially a bad movie, Street Kings is fairly tight and energetic.
Read Full Review
58
Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Every so often, Keanu Reeves' robo-voiced blankness serves him well, but when he has to play a pulpy, tormented demon-saint, scraping up insults and spitting them out like bullets, he's like the host of an infomercial doing an impersonation of a badass.
Read Full Review
58
Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
See it with people who take it for the trash it is, and you can cheer the baroque killings and laugh fondly with Forest Whitaker as he tries too hard to create a domestic sociopath to match his role as "Idi Amin."
Read Full Review
58
The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
After all the actorly fireworks, Street Kings concludes that the LAPD is an institution where even the well-intentioned can't work clean. Okay. What else?
Read Full Review
58
Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
It's hard to recall another time when the cross-purposes of two collaborating filmmakers of a major film has been quite so evident, or when the theme of the movie itself has been so totally schizophrenic -- half populist outrage, half Nazi.
Read Full Review
50
Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
It preserves the peculiar machismo of Ayer's earlier projects: the alpha male dominates not only because he's the most powerful, but because he's the most jaded.
Read Full Review
50
Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
I enjoyed parts of Street Kings but I didn’t believe one thing about it, and I couldn’t get past Reeves’ unsuitability to his role. He may someday play a cop on the edge convincingly, but the edge needs to be sharper than this.
Read Full Review
50
Slate Dana Stevens
There's something cynical about Ayer's attempt to preserve Ludlow as a hero after scene upon scene meant to show, with heavy irony, how lawlessly he enforced the law. You can't lionize your "Dirty Harry" vigilante and expose his hypocrisy, too.
Read Full Review
50
Village Voice Tim Grierson
Ayer's grim police thriller mostly plays as one long dick-measuring competition. You sense that an infinitely more complex drama exists within the film's grasp, but no one bothered to stop guzzling the testosterone long enough to find it.
Read Full Review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Stephen Cole
A bad-cop, worse-cop movie.
Read Full Review
50
Rolling Stone Peter Travers
The acting? Common and the Game score as baddies, but Hugh Laurie as an acid-tongued internal-affairs cop is disappointingly just House without the limp.
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50
TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
There are two kinds of police officers in David Ayers and James Ellroy's convoluted, ultraviolent tale of corruption within the LAPD: dirty cops and dirtier ones.
Read Full Review
40
Washington Post Desson Thomson
All the movie's treacheries, deceptions and story twists are marred by our lack of innocence. We see the big picture way before the characters do, and that pushes us right out of the movie and back into our seats -- the last place we want to be.
Read Full Review
38
USA Today Claudia Puig
Wastes a moderately intriguing premise by filling it with laughably clichéd dialogue, one-dimensional characters and implausible turns of events.
Read Full Review
30
Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar
Two things come to mind as you watch the first act of Street Kings, the first is how fresh and exciting the movie would’ve been if it was released in 1984, the second is the question, “James Ellroy wrote that?”
Read Full Review

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 7.5 (out of 10) based on 35 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Shandra L. gave it a2:
Although there are lots of fight scenes, the plot is slow-moving and tedious. Hugh Laurie is a total disappointment and his wraith-like, inconsequential character is 2-dimensional and without any apparent reason for being in the film. The only good thing about the film was the plethora of good-looking people - Keanu is still drool-alicious.

Junior gave it a9:
This was a surprisingly good movie considering who the lead actor and what type of "professional" reviews this movie received. I left the movie with a great experience and I was entertained the whole way through. Yes, at times it was very typical and some lines were weird but it didn't take much at all away from the movie. A must see for everyone because this is as serious and realistic as you get in a movie. If you don't catch this in the theaters, its one for your DVD collection.

Chris H. gave it a9:
Great Ellroy adaptation. Vastly underrated, though bears some similarity to 1997's L.A. Confidential

Tay W. gave it a10:
The movie hits a serious issue of corruption within the law enforcement. Whitaker and Reeves did a wonderful performance.

Jandra gave it a9:
An entertaining thrill ride.

David S. gave it a7:
Astounding dialogue, subtle characterization, pretty solid acting across the board, but - for a movie whose ending is clear pretty much from the get-go - it gets kind of rushed and incoherent at the end.

Bo M. gave it a10:
Finally another cop movie that delivers and is king and raises the bar in the world of police corruption, I can't believe no one else gets it, and sees how great this film is. It doesn't get any better then this, I have to put this one in my pile of all time classic great dark cop films, and this is my new number one, among the greats like Training Day, Copland, Internal Affairs, Narc, LA Confidential, The Departed, Harsh Times, The Negotiator,

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