TV has killed movies like Street Kings. Once upon a time a slight film like this would be part of a good double feature; you may even have ended up liking the smaller, unpretentious feature more than the bigger movie driving that double bill. But now movies like that have become TV shows on cable. The truth is that besides some cursing, there's not much in Street Kings that you couldn't find in an episode of The Shield, all the way down to its setting.

Which isn't to say that Street Kings isn't any good. It's a fine movie, but it doesn't bring a single new thing to the table. It's hard to justify the cost of a night out at the movies when it comes to a movie like this. Middle of the road programmers: they're the biggest casualty of rising movie ticket prices.

Keanu Reeves is miscast as a cop who is not quite dirty; he doesn't take bribes or deal drugs, but he is a triggerman for a vice squad that takes the law into their own hands. Keanu is the guy who knocks down the door and puts a bullet in the face of a guy on the toilet because he's part of a ring that kidnaps and rapes young girls. He's the muscle of the Dirty Harry squad, essentially. But when his former partner, who has been going to Internal Affairs about the inner dealings of the Dirty Harry squad, gets blown away by machine gun toting gangbangers after Keanu accidentally put a bullet in his shoulder (it's just as plausibility stretching in the film as it is in text), Keanu starts to go even outside of the squad who goes outside the law in an attempt to find out the truth. And if you can't guess what he finds out... well, you're the ideal audience for Street Kings.

I like Street Kings' varying shades of grey when it comes to dirty cops; Keanu is technically a dirty cop because he executes criminals, but we're pretty sure all these criminals could really use some executing, and besides, we see that it's impacting his conscience. He tells the other cops in his unit (including a seriously hilariously miscast and mustachioed Jay Mohr) that he's pulling the trigger because he doesn't want these killings on their shoulders. Again, it's not original - it's sort of the whole basis of The Shield - but it's a relevant area to examine in this post-Ramparts era.

But so much else of Street Kings just slides away from you. There are good performances - Chris Evans continues to prove that he's one of the best young mainstream actors out there (why he's not getting better roles in better films eludes me), and Hugh Laurie makes a good Internal Affairs investigator who is convinced the police department is riddled with lupus*.  I don't know that Forrest Whitaker gives a good performance, but it's a fun one; emboldened with his Oscar he takes the opportunity to chew his way through all of the scenery with abandon, especially in his big capper scene at the end. But as is so often the case, Keanu Reeves just drags the whole thing down.

Reeves is not a hard edged drunk who kills for a living. It's sort of amazing that John Cusack could play a role like that but Keanu Reeves is totally incapable, and there's no way to get past it in all of Street Kings' runtime. I do think I would buy him as a serial killer, though - there's a certain blankness to him, even in real life, that feels like it could contain massive amounts of icy hearted hate. I don't think that Keanu kills Street Kings - Evans, who doesn't get enough screentime at all, keeps it afloat - but he never helps the movie transcend its TV showitis.

David Ayer is becoming the modern Homer of criminal LA; he wrote Training Day, and he directed Harsh Times. There doesn't feel like there's a whole lot more for him to mine in this milieu, and I hope he moves on to something different for his next film. Ayer isn't a great director, but he's certainly competent enough - and does a good job of shooting the most overshot city on Earth - that I'm interested in seeing what he has coming up next. As long as it's a little bit different.

It would have been nice if Street Kings had in some way distinguished itself. Never going completely into gritty realism while also never going into slambang action, Street Kings is a film in search of its own Vic Mackey.

6.5 out of 10

*This is a House joke. I'm not sure I needed to explain that.