Dark Blue

[Gold Trumpet]

I looked forward to this movie a lot and am sad to say it fell flat on its face through the worst enemy of  good movies - contrivance. The movie had a very honest and focused look at showing Kurt Russell's character first in testimony as someone we may identify with being as a hero but then revealing an accepted by society evil that he had. Kurt Russel is magnificent as a man so rooted in the biases of a bad cop who is a racist at level and hater of bad men at a level. He believes he is doing good, when a madness is driving it instead. The character performance is good but then the movie tanks with the story.


*spoiler*
Russel's partner, a new guy, is sleeping with a black cop, who he doesn't know the real position of in the police department. She actually is the assistant of a major police officer who is going after Kurt Russel and his partner for unwarranted shootings and cover ups of it. To complicate the relationship between the partner and the girl, he finds out she had an affair with the officer she is working for. Matters get only more contrived to a point where Kurt Russell's character gives a completely ridiculous speech to end it all in a contrivance beyond any contrivance i've seen in a while. This is such a sad thing because it dealt with a cop so much rooted in the biases that caused the LA riots in '91 that it could have played a great character study of his madness and collapse going with the fall of the city with those riots. Russell gave a performance that would have been up for that, but the main problem in movies today is that the writing couldn't keep up.

~rougerum

[Ghostboy]

I only saw the first hour or so...I was getting into it, and was going to go back to watch the whole thing again. I probably will anyway, but that sucks that it falls prey to formularity. I had hopes...but the script is by David Ayer, whose 'Training Day' had exactly the same problem.