A curious kind of double game is being played in Dark Blue, a cop thriller that sets out to “explain” the 1992 LA riots. For a good while I sat thinking, “At last—a movie that doesn’t mince words about police corruption and racism,” for even if it’s a decade late and a bit simplistic in some of its moral positioning, the story doesn’t soft-pedal the facts. (It even prompted me to think how useful it might be if someone in Hollywood delivered a thriller about the Enron scandal—not ten years from now but before the next presidential election.) But I soon realized that the attempt to wed a comfortable genre to an uncomfortable social agenda allowed another kind of soft-pedaling to take over.
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The filmmakers—Ron Shelton directing a David Ayer script based on a James Ellroy story—obviously want us to swallow a bitter pill, but traditionally Hollywood genres, even the LA cop thriller, are sweet and don’t have much of an aftertaste. Inevitably, bitter and sweet start working at cross-purposes. If Dark Blue were doing its job, the LA riots would be the logical culmination of everything preceding them. Instead they come across as yet another melodramatic contrivance in a story that’s already staggering under the weight of far too many.
This is all perfectly acceptable, perhaps even necessary, in a certain kind of cop thriller. But it doesn’t reflect reality, which can’t be divided into good guys and bad guys without leaving out lots of essential information. (Our president prefers to leave out the information that former presidents treated a couple of his bad guys like good guys by arming them to the teeth.) And since Dark Blue professes to be concerned with reality—specifically the Rodney King trial and the riots that followed the verdict—it can only founder with characters that are constructed to serve generic functions.
Directed by Ron Shelton
Written by David Ayer and James Ellroy
With Kurt Russell, Scott Speedman, Brendan Gleeson, Michael Michele, Ving Rhames, Lolita Davidovich, Kurupt, and Jamison Jones.
