Keanu Reeves is a bad guy, but he’s also a good guy. He’s a cop who makes back door deals, fucks with vicious gangsters and then rigs crime scenes when he doesn’t get what he planned after making a trade off with Korean gang members in a parking lot. Now, I want to say that “Street Kings” is just another really bad movie from Mr. Keanu Reeves, but really what you’ll just get it a two hour modern remake of “L.A. Confidential,” which is not a shocker when James Ellroy penned the aforementioned classic. The eighties are in full force, and stuck like shit on the recycled concept that, when all was said and done, really just made me want to see “L.A. Confidential” for the one hundredth time, and forget I ever laid eyes on this. Sorry for the repetition, but I can’t stress that enough. It’s nothing but a slick remake. This is a terrible movie, folks. There is every cop movie cliché you’ve ever seen, every crooked cop movie twist you’ve ever seen, every moral dilemma you’ve ever seen, and every character redemption development you’ve ever seen squeezed into a finely polished movie about a bad guy who learns he wants to be a good guy when he discovers the good guys are actually the bad guys.

Ayer works against type (in another painful misstep) by featuring an anti-hero who lacks the depth and inherent psychopathic tendencies as the folks from “Training Day,” and even “Harsh Times.” While folks like Bale and Washington played antagonists we were able to obtain some sense of sympathy and common ground with on purely visceral levels, Reeves (as Ludlow) provides nothing more than an archetypal tortured cop that’s become the model for hundreds of cop films across the board. And it’s a waste when you consider the enormous amount of talent on display, from Forrest Whitaker, to Hugh Laurie and neither of these fine actors can keep this shit pickle afloat. Meanwhile Whitaker can never seem to find a balance between wildly over the top police chief, and woefully cardboard character, and his constantly bipolar shifting makes for some of the most inadvertently comedic material in “Street Kings,” while the film itself can also never decide what it wants to be.

Is it a cop action movie, a conspiracy drama, or a mindless shoot em up thriller? After seeing and falling in love with “Training Day,” “Harsh Times,” and “L.A. Confidential,” Ayer and Ellroy seem to be working at levels far beyond their own abilities, and posit “Street Kings” as the weakest of the links and make no argument for observing this on the levels of the previously mentioned titles. While they took serious and incredible looks into the morality or lack thereof among the LAPD, and how the brotherhood always outweighs fairness and justice, “Street Kings” comes off as painfully clunky with a message that’s as broad as a typical action entry.

The best way to describe this atrocity would be as “L.A. Confidential for Dummies.” It’s modernized, watered down, dumbed down, predictable, and incredibly clunky, with the remarkable cast, with zero remarkable performances.