1hr 49min - Rated R - Thriller

Says a cop in this corrupt-cop melodrama: "We're the cops. We can do whatever we want." Yes they can and yes they do.

The streets in this fierce action drama aren't just mean. They're downright sadistic. And the cops aren't just dirty. They're filthy. In Street Kings, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Keanu Reeves, who also played an L.A. police officer in 1994's memorable Speed, stars as alcoholic (miniature bottles notwithstanding) widower Tom Ludlow, a veteran LAPD vice cop.

Ludlow is principled but crazed and ruthless. He follows certain rules to the letter while breaking others at will. Also, the occasional arm or leg.

His smooth captain is Jack Wander, played by Forest Whitaker, who takes so much credit after Ludlow rescues two teens from a group of vicious kidnappers that he wanders into a promotion.

When Ludlow's former partner, Terrence Washington, played by Terry Crews, is targeted for an investigation by Internal Affairs, he makes a deal by offering up incriminating confessions about Ludlow's improprieties. That brings Internal Affairs captain Hugh Laurie snooping around to see just what Ludlow has up his sleeve and in his past.

When Washington is gunned down, Ludlow is implicated because of certain evidence that conveniently turns up. Ludlow knows he was ratted out and is being set up by guys he's served with for years. So, despite Wanders' protestations, he joins the detective investigating his former partner's death -- he's played by Chris Evans.

Director David Ayer -- who wrote and directed Harsh Times, and wrote the Denzel Washington vehicle, Training Day, another Los Angeles-set dirty-cop thriller -- gives the film a properly gritty look and feel, but he avoids complexity like the plague, instead staging the action for a violence-craving audience, and overloading the simplistic film with frantic shoot-em-up sequences that prove to be numbing and rob the gunplay of any dramatic impact.

The cynical and convoluted script, full of testosterone and shouting and macho posturing, is about law-enforcement ethics -- or, rather, the lack thereof. It's by a triumvirate of screenwriters that includes veteran crime novelist James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential), so it's never boring. But it's also outrageous, never quite knowing when to stop. Instead of offering a soberingly high percentage of bad cops, this portrait of collective corruption offers just about only bad cops. In football, that's called piling on.

And there's lots of miscasting. No one seems exactly right for his role. That includes Reeves and Laurie, but especially applies to Whitaker, who is especially off his game. Rarely has he looked less comfortable or gotten more unintentional laughs with his overemphatic line readings and facial expressions.

As mesmerizing as deserving Oscar winner Forest Whitaker was in The Last King of Scotland, he's that excruciatingly awful here, distracting us further from a narrative that, frankly, can use all the help it can get.

Street Kings is a high-energy but low-grade cops-gone-wild thriller.