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Most writers and directors, no matter how versatile they may be, have a forte, a niche, a specific genre or mode of storytelling at which they excel or prefer creating. David Ayers enjoys returning time and time again to the brutal realities of law enforcement in inner city Los Angeles. Training Day, Harsh Times, and the recently released Street Kings are all offspring of Ayers's penchant for highlighting the seedy underbelly of LA's boys in blue. Aided by writers James Ellroy and Kurt Wimmer, Street Kings attempts to be equal parts Training Day and L.A. Confidential with a dash of Serpico but fails, for a variety of reasons, to add anything unique or original to the familiar crime genre.

Detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) doesn't put much value in anything but his work. When it comes to solving the case, he doesn't put much stock in proper police procedure either, opting to interogate criminals with a phone book or shoot them without asking questions. Captain Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker) doesn't mind Ludlow's methods. In fact, he's proud of his crew and happy to cover up their unorthodox and borderline unethical methods because they get the job done.

An early rescue of two young girls from a prostitution ring thrusts Ludlow into the hero spotlight and brings about a promotion for Wander. However, the attention brings on some heat from Captain James Biggs (Hugh Laurie) of Internal Affairs, who has been tipped off by Ludlow's "my eyes have been opened" ex-partner Terrence Washington (Terry Crews) that something is rotten within Wander's unit. After Washington ends up murdered by two seemingly random gang members, Ludlow is implicated and Wander demotes him to mundane deskwork until the heat can die down. It's not long though until Ludlow takes it upon himself to uncover the identity of Washington's murderers. Accompanied by young, naive Detective Paul Diskant (Chris Evans), Ludlow stumbles upon a string of greed, corruption, and deceit that runs from the inner city streets to the upper echelons of the law and that puts his life at risk.

This movie is comparable to an electric football game: all the pieces are in place for an exciting result, but once executed, each piece does God knows what and the whole thing gets shot to hell. Every aspect of the film from the exposition to the acting is a mess and Ayers shows in his sophomore directorial effort that he can't plug the holes that plague the script. He's clearly not an actor's director, subjugating Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker to a second-rate Denzel Washington impersonator and failing to bring Chris Evans up to the potential he showed in Sunshine. Emmy-nominated Hugh Laurie is forced into a caricature in an effort to express his character's motivations in a relatively limited amount of screen time. They, however, are just the tip of the iceberg.

Serpico had Al Pacino. L.A. Confidential had Russell Crowe. Training Day had Denzel Washington. Street Kings has Keanu Reeves. Never known as an actor who could handle subtleties or psychological complexities, Reeves is nevertheless handed the reins of a world-weary alcoholic caught in the midst of a plot set in motion by higher powers. Sound familiar? He attacks his role with the force of a flaccid penis, counting on expository dialogue to detail his character: we only know he's an alcoholic because Wander comments about his drunk driving, we only know he doesn't care about his own life because a colleague says so, and we only know he's tortured by his wife's death because of an awkward exchange with the doctor who handled her autopsy.

His stiff acting and poorly developed character inhibit the conflict that can be extracted from the film's solitary redeeming quality - raising the question of whether certain amounts of cover-ups are necessary to get things done. The film offers up Detective Tom Ludlow to answer the question of "who's going to control the dogs?" but presents him and the environment in which he works in such a half-assed manner that it doesn't seem much like there are any dogs that need to be controlled. Combine the shoddy execution with a twist ending that's a surprise to nobody but Ludlow and you've got a 109 minutes that could've been better spent with that guy on whom "King Kong doesn't have shit.