Dark Blue review

There's undoubtedly a good film to be made surrounding the events which triggered Los Angeles' infamous riots of 1991. Unfortunately Dark Blue isn't it. When Rodney King's alleged attackers - four white cops - were let off the hook, not only did Black LA make its feelings very clear, but it became instantly obvious that corruption ran deep in the heart of LA's finest boys in (dark) blue.

This is spelled out in the initial scene of the film when Detective Eldon Perry (Russell) is acquitted from a charge of negligent shooting. This isn't the first time this has happened to Perry and when he immediately has a champagne celebration with sleazy Chief of Police Jack Van Meter (Gleeson) we know that rules mean little to these men. But of course, Kurt Russell can't be all bad, and we are about to find out that rules do have to be broken on occasion. Like a Training Day-lite, we then proceed to witness Eldon take his young protégé Bobby Keough (Scott Speedman) on a tour of LA's dark side. The comparison to Training Day is inevitable given the rookie's astonishment and gradual understanding of the senior cop's unorthodox methods. Ving Rhames pops up from time to time as a the honest black cop who is trying to find justice and is on both Perry's and Van Meter's back. However, Dark Blue is unlikely to be remembered come Oscar time.

Russell has been floundering for some years now in films that have been way below his potential. Not since 1997's Breakdown has he appeared in something truly interesting. He still has the boyish good looks and piercing eyes that made him a medium-sized Hollywood star twenty years ago and to be fair he makes a decent stab of playing the hard-nosed cop who's not averse to a little corruption of his own. But unless he starts making better choices or simply receives better scripts, it's likely that his career will be remembered for a series of half-baked films that might have seemed like a good idea when they went into development.

And that's exactly the case with Dark Blue, where Ron Shelton (who specialises in sports films from the sublime Tin Cup to the frankly appalling Play It To The Bone) is guilty of over-directing material that is not his natural subject matter. The film tries too hard: it's over-edited, with a crushing hip-hop soundtrack and with a script that does little justice to the story it is trying to tell.