Cops gone bad
Dark Blue uses the trial of four officers charged with beating Rodney King as a starting point for an ugly, harsh investigation of the Los Angeles Police Department’s internal corruption. Taken from a story by bilious, neo-pulp writer James Ellroy, the movie’s ante is upped by screenwriter David Ayer’s (Training Day) infatuation with a side of life most would like to leave undisturbed in its damp, dark home beneath a rock. With a denouement to rival The Day of the Locust’s parade of human grotesquerie, Dark Blue comes as close as any recent film to the black fury of B or C-grade classic film noir.
Sgt. Eldon Perry (Kurt Russell) is from a long line of Los Angeles police officers. Like his father before him, and his grandfather before him, Perry is a morally corrupt cowboy whose certainty that he is doing away with the scumbags that litter the city streets excuses all forms of brutality and deceit.
But Dark Blue is also about the lineage of men behaving badly and the dark whirlpool of machismo that binds fathers and sons together in a devil’s contract. Like another contemporary noir, Chinatown, the larger societal corruption has trickled down to families who have a comparable sickness of their own. Dark Blue’s critique goes so deeply and wraps so many in its cold, nihilistic arms, the audience at a preview screening appeared flummoxed and defeated by the film’s end, unsure of how to comprehend a film where heroes are nowhere in sight.
In a performance of often sickening but also heartwrenching extremes, Perry is a hard man to like. A bully with a badge who coerces information from a street thug with a face full of mace, Perry is a raging, cage-rattling gorilla. He takes an often sadistic, laughing pleasure in the free reign his job gives him and instructs his fresh-meat partner Bobby Keough (Scott Speedman) on how to carry on this tradition of violence.
But midway through Dark Blue’s brutal splenetic expose, Perry is given a harsh dressing-down by his commanding chief Jack Van Meter (Brendan Gleeson) in front of Keough. Suddenly, the confident machismo facade cracks, Perry’s face crumbles into an expression of whipped-dog humiliation and his character is revealed. Instead of some preening John Wayne cowboy operating with impunity, Russell is a marionette with strings pulled by bigger cowboys. With that role comes a nasty kind of self-recognition that all the dreams of crime fighting that once defined him have now reduced him to a two-bit hood carrying out orders for the bossman.
Dark Blue is a bitter, often stunning sewer elegy for the little-man-as-monster, the nobody who thinks he’s somebody but who is just a stooge trapped within a corrupt system.
As is typical in the black universe of Dark Blue, the “good guys” out to reveal the corruption within the L.A.P.D. and save Perry from himself are no more likable than the crooks. Ving Rhames is stone-faced and unyielding as the black officer who aims to topple the old boys network holding the L.A.P.D. together.
Dark Blue is carried by a hypnotic performance from B-movie actor Russell, whose second-tier status in Hollywood gives his second-rate cop — who boasts and struts his power but clearly knows his real authority is held by an invisible chain around his neck — a real conviction.
Director Ron Shelton (Bull Durham) tends to play to the back of the house, underscoring every fresh revelation of corruption with an exclamation point so even the half-wits can’t miss it, but that slightly cheesy, tawdry dimension intensifies its connection to old school noir. Dark Blue is not always expert, but it is undeniably visceral filmmaking.