56.3%
Based on 54 Reviews
Movie Info
Released:
April 11, 2008
Runtime:
1hr 47min
Director:
David Ayer
Writer:
James Ellroy, Kurt Wimmer, Jamie Moss
Cast:
Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker, Hugh Laurie, Chris Evans, Jay Mohr
Rating:
R for strong violence and pervasive language.
Plot:
Tom Ludlow is a veteran LAPD cop who finds life difficult to navigate after the death of his wife. When evidence implicates him in the execution of a fellow officer, he is forced to go up against the cop culture he's been a part of his entire career, ultimately leading him to question the loyalties of everyone around him.
86.0% Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Karen Martin
It’s not subtle, but it’s plenty exciting, even if the ever-increasing degree of revelation is a little too enamored of its power to retain attention by the film’s conclusion.
80.0% New York Daily News Joe Neumaier
Keanu Reeves knows action thrillers and how to make that Zen vagueness of his serve the greater good. Street Kings is an arresting ride.
75.0% The Oklahoman Gene Triplett
Those who love high-velocity, viscerally thrilling police action-drama will find Street Kings arresting indeed.
75.0% Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
Street Kings is a good, compelling, violent picture, but it has its flaws, not the least of which is the casting of Reeves and Whitaker.
75.0% San Antonio Express-News Larry Ratliff
Street Kings, unlike the recent cop drama Gone Baby Gone, feels like it slid out of a police precinct file cabinet and slapped itself on a movie screen.
75.0% 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.
75.0% St. Paul Pioneer Press Chris Hewitt
Director David Ayers finds tension in the contrast between the fairly realistic story and the over-the-top chaos of the cops' lives.
74.0% Palm Beach Post Hap Erstein
Excessively violent, from its heart-pounding opening sequence straight through to the end, this is a popcorn movie masquerading as social commentary.
70.0% Coming Soon Joshua Starnes
It's a bit pat and has feelings of having been done before, but it is at least expertly done repetition and there is something to be said for that.
70.0% Maxim Eric Alt
This is an under-the-radar crime thriller that delivers pretty much all you can ask for. A solid two hours of cop drama.
68.0% Dallas Morning News Chris Vognar
Street Kings is the cinematic equivalent of solid crime-genre fiction. It keeps the visual pages turning for a couple hours and navigates the dark corners of corruption and dishonor among men.
68.0% Orange County Register Orange County Register
Until the final stretch, anyway, the movie's potential as a gritty, gnash-and-claw thriller holds up nicely.
62.5% Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Street Kings is nonsense, and yet the crooked, racialized world underneath the soulless mayhem is pretty fascinating.
62.5% Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
Street Kings is perfectly passable filler to help pass the time while we wait for the return of The Shield.
62.5% New York Post Kyle Smith
Keanu Reeves is required to seem like the dumbest guy in the room. You could say he was born to play this role.
62.5% Premiere Jenni Miller
A bloody crime caper in a somewhat lackluster month, so if you’re looking for some big, stupid fun, you could do worse than Street Kings.
62.5% Toronto Star Peter Howell
The movie belongs to Reeves, who at 43 is finally starting to look like an adult, with greater heft all round. He does Clint proud.
62.0% A.V. Club Scott Tobias
Street Kings concludes that the LAPD is an institution where even the well-intentioned can't work clean. Okay. What else?
62.0% Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Street Kings isn't boring, but it peaks two-thirds of the way throug.
62.0% Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
It's probably safe to say that no fiction writer ever created bad cops as bad as James Ellroy's
62.0% Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
As a mystery, a shoot-'em-up and a nightmarish vision of urban hell, Street Kings holds your interest from start to finish.
62.0% St. Louis Post-Dispatch Joe Williams
Commits the serious dramatic crimes of being predictable and convoluted.
60.0% Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Despite its limitations, however, Street Kings is a solid contemporary crime drama.
60.0% Contact Music Bill Gibron
Street Kings doesn't offer up anything new or original.
60.0% Metromix Matt Pais
In Street Kings the pieces are more intriguing than the puzzle, which becomes less and less distinctive as it comes together.
56.0% Boston Herald James Verniere
Street Kings is replete with hard-boiled dialogue, grunting he-men and action so testosterone-pumped it gave me a raging ’roid migraine.
56.0% E! Online Alex Markerson
The lively action scenes can't make up for some DOA dialogue and connect-the-dots plotting.
50.0% Arizona Republic Bill Goodykoontz
With Street Kings, Reeves has hit upon a stroke of genius: Choose a project that's even dumber than our perception of him. He can't help but look good by comparison.
50.0% Canoe.ca Kevin Williamson
Keanu Reeves spends most of Street Kings, the noisiest collision of cop flick cliches since Hot Fuzz, looking like he can't hear himself think.
50.0% Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
The movie runs around chasing subplots, letting the actors chew it up, while Reeves does the opposite.
50.0% Dayton Daily News Eric Robinette
Does Street Kings set itself apart from every cop thriller ever made? It sure does. Unfortunately, what makes the movie distinct is how badly it goes wrong.
50.0% Denver Post Lisa Kennedy
Street Kings has hints of Training Day and the subtle aroma of L.A. Confidential.
50.0% Detroit News Tom Long
If you've seen Training Day, you've seen Street Kings done better.
50.0% Hollywood.com Robert Sims
This bloody L.A. showdown pitting rogue cop vs. dirty cops is nothing more than Training Day mashed with Dark Blue. It could be because David Ayer had a hand in writing all three streetwise tales of police corruption.
50.0% IGN Eric Moro
Street Kings is a film in search of an identity.
50.0% Knoxville News Sentinel Betsy Pickle
Reeves wears the weight of Tom's career on his face and delivers risky dialogue credibly. Whitaker and Laurie are both excellent as the father figures fighting for his soul.
50.0% Newsday Rafer Guzmán
You can always count on James Ellroy for a night of feel-bad entertainment.
50.0% Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Barbara Vancheri
Street Kings has a top-notch cast and 107 minutes worth of dialogue that sounds as if it has been recycled from every old cop show and movie in existence.
50.0% Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Michael Machosky
It's got everything it needs except that one great central performance.
50.0% Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Hugh Laurie as an acid-tongued internal-affairs cop is disappointingly just House without the limp.
50.0% Seattle Times Mark Rahner
The movie is riddled with bad dialogue.
50.0% Slant Magazine Bill Weber
Street Kings opportunistically miscasts Reeves as "the point of the spear" among a unit of Dirty Harrys, but it's only a semi-mistake.
50.0% Star Tribune (Minneapolis) Colin Covert
Ten minutes into Street Kings, the film bluntly shows us what to expect for the next 100.
50.0% Tulsa World Michael Smith
The oozing-with-testosterone cop melodrama that is Street Kings would have been a perfect addition to the TBS program: Movies for Guys Who Like Movies if the show with TV’s highest body count were still on the air.
50.0% 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.
40.0% Eye Weekly (Toronto) Jason Anderson
As much a dick-swinging contest as a movie, Street Kings is all hopped on testosterone with nowhere to go.
40.0% Fort Worth Star-Telegram Christopher Kelly
A thriller that combines elements of Lethal Weapon, Internal Affairs and the TV show The Shield, among many others, into one overly familiar, extremely bloody package.
40.0% Orlando Sentinel Roger Moore
Keanu Reeves tries his best to channel Denzel and Clint in Street Kings, a wild and woolly if also slack and silly bad-cops-kill-other-bad-cops thriller.
37.5% Chicago Sun-Times Jim Emerson
Street Kings is an anemic attempt to evoke the big, shiny action pictures of the late '80s and early '90s, the heyday of Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
37.5% Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City) Jeff Vice
No matter how hard he tries, Keanu Reeves is no Denzel Washington. He's no Kurt Russell, either. And he's certainly no Christian Bale, for that matter ...
37.5% Kansas City Star Robert W. Butler
The air is thick with tough-guy talk, but hot air fills the core of Street Kings, a tale of corruption in which the cops are the crooks.
37.5% Richmond Times-Dispatch Daniel Neman
The bad choices made by the makers of Street Kings fall into two main categories: genuinely bad and astonishingly bad.
37.5% USA Today Claudia Puig
Street Kings wastes a moderately intriguing premise by filling it with laughably clichéd dialogue, one-dimensional characters and implausible turns of events.
25.0% Salt Lake Tribune Sean P. Means
Director David Ayer continues to milk his street cred for writing Training Day, this time adapting a James Ellroy story into a grimy copy of Ellroy's L.A. Confidential.
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