Review of Dark Blue

Introduction

As the police officers who beat motorist Rodney King lie awaiting the jury’s verdict, bent cops are up to their usual tricks on the streets of LA: rogue officer Eldon Perry (Kurt Russell) is ordered by his Machiavellian boss Jack Van Meter (Brendan Gleeson) to tidy away a quadruple homicide as quickly as possible, given the pressing fact that the real killers incriminate his own illegal transgressions. However, Perry’s new partner Bobby Keough (Scott Speedman), has other ideas and isn’t immediately swayed by Perry’s kill or be killed street morality. Meanwhile, incumbent chief Arthur Holland (Ving Rhames) suffers Gleeson’s smear campaigns, but responds with renewed fury and seeks to crush Perry and Van Meter’s cabal before the city explodes in a firestorm of racial anger.

Video

As you might expect, the anamorphic transfer is stark, lush and vibrant and without obvious flaws. Whilst the minimal budget becomes evident in the very limited representation of the riots, cinematographer Barry Peterson’s lighting makes creative use of locations around Los Angeles.

Audio

An offbeat score from jazz-maestro (and Spike Lee regular) Terence Blanchard. Blanchard tends to offset rather than emphasise the emotional dialogue of a scene, to particularly significant effect here, given the audience’s in-built expectations with such a genre. Still, the results are impressively reproduced in this transfer.

Features

Three featurettes that ostensibly compose a document that schematically outlines the production. The presence of the main players amounts to little more than rehearsed soundbites, and it’s left to more peripheral cast and crew to explore the areas we are used to expecting from such things. If this, and the photo gallery, trailers and TV spot are conventional stuff, Ron Shelton’s commentary is involving, sporadically informative, and always manages to reflect the intelligence and toughness of the material.

Conclusion

Director Ron Shelton finally shakes off the ‘guru of the quasi-satirical sports movie’ tag with this racially charged police procedural. Adapted by ‘Training Day’s David Ayer from an original story by James Ellroy, (appropriately titled ‘Plague Season’), ‘Dark Blue’ reconstitutes elements familiar to both: police corruption, a tough, pragmatic tone, a grime and ghetto setting and, most significantly, morally ambiguous characters. There are ruthlessly ambitious liberals, rootless mavericks, patriarchs with a heart of coal, like James Cromwell in ‘LA Confidential’, here transubstantiated into the creepily convincing form of Brendan Gleeson, who delivers a performance of disarming coldness, like a vampire preying on its own crypt.

As the Rodney King ticking time-bomb throbs in the background, Russell effectively riffs on his jocular screen persona by merging Perry`s cocky, brazen machismo with a despairing, haunted undertow. Rhames peppers his role with arch delivery and regal poses, but still manages to maintain an authentic poise. And whilst ‘Dark Blue’ declares itself as fiction, its fictive elements all too readily blend with the mischievous myth-making of Ellroy: Rhames’s character particularly suggests that the laissez-faire attitude deployed by the post-Rodney King LAPD leaves policing in its most castrated form, where the need for political correctness overtakes the need to protect the public and punish lawbreakers.

However, the film never confronts issues before or after the Rodney King case and thus it asks to be consumed purely as a police corruption thriller, as opposed to a major piece exposing the moral hypocrisy of both the rioters and those who came to chastise them. This does the film no favours: all the hard-boiled, foulmouthed elements of a labyrinthine Ellroy masterpiece are in place, but Shelton lets the side down with his typically loose, unfussy direction, more interested in covering character bases than keeping the structural integrity of the piece lucid and sharp. Also, if the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict is left unrewarded by the narrative, what justifies its inclusion in the first place? If the film ultimately short-changes its subject matter, it casts a long enough shadow to create meaty material for those who care to look for it; However, for the undiscerning viewer, ‘Dark Blue’ may appear little more than an elongated episode of ‘The Shield’.

In a world of McG’s and Michael Bay’s, critics are usually pleading for a lighter touch, ‘Dark Blue’ is a worthwhile and engrossing picture that could have done with a harder edge to match its tough-talking.