Streets of Blood 2009

Streets of Blood 2009

I have to admit, I love Val Kilmer.  He is still my favorite Batman, despite the movie being bad, and The Saint (1997) is a favorite guilty pleasure.  Recently I caught Kilmer in Felon where his performance saved an otherwise bad B movie and so I had some hope for Streets of Blood when I saw it pop up on Netflix.  It also stars Sharon Stone who has delivered great performances throughout her career, Basic Instinct anyone?, and one of my favorite supporting actors Barry Shabaka Henley, known recently for recurring rolls in Heroes and FlashForward or in an ancillary role in Four Brothers (2005).  Also with a lead role in the film is the rapper 50 Cent, who surprised me by not being horrible.  The director, Charles Winkler, and DP, Roy Wagner, were unknown to me before this film.  I think I will forget their names by the end of the week after watching this film.

This B movie plays out a lot like a made-for-TV movie, but deals with the topic of post-Katrina New Orleans, a topic I find intriguing.  The settings throughout are interesting, but mostly fail to capture the stark and intense flavor of destroyed New Orleans.  Abandoned schools, FEMA trailer parks, and flooding streets are all used to set the stage, but mostly each set comes across as cheap and poorly lit.  The topic of dirty cops being investigated by the FBI in a city that is still in chaos should be a recipe for deep intrigue or at least exciting action sequences.  This movie tries for both and fails to reach either.  Its action scenes are choppy and the attempts to make them gritty creates cheesiness. The twists in the plot are telegraphed with an air horn and police lights, but using the interviews between the police psychologist, Sharon Stone, and the main characters does add a bit of creativity to the script.

Streets of Blood is really forgettable and so was Val Kilmer in the role of the ethical-but-dirty, antihero Detective Devereaux.  Both Kilmer and Stone pull out some decent voice talent trying to represent that distinct southern Louisiana drawl.  Despite the accent the characters, script, and acting were all dull, uninteresting, and lacking in substance.  Devereaux makes multiple references to his hero father, a cop killed on duty, but this lame background fact to make the audience sympathetic with a rogue cop fails almost as badly as the weak half-attempt at sexual tension between Kilmer and Stone.

The one redeeming quality of this movie was that it forced me to reexamine my unprovoked dislike for 50 Cent.  Throughout the movie he puts up a solid effort that would fit in with any B movie and he could easily go toe to toe with other rapper-actors like DMX or Ice T.  His acting didn't rise to the level of the other professional actors in the film, but it was consistently OK.  

Overall this movie has B written all over it.  It has cheap sets, a cast of has-beens and rappers, and a script written by tarantula-monkey hybrids with no understanding of character motivation or connections with an audience.  I would recommend this movie to people looking for an action movie to laugh at or to people who want to rethink there image of actors/actresses who used to be sexy.