Release date: 18/04/08
Running Time: 1hr 48mins

The LA Tourist Board is almost certain to take out a contract on the life of David Ayer after seeing this film. The writer/director who gave us Harsh Times and Training Day adds another entry to his steadily growing resume of violent films depicting Los Angeles as Hell-on-Earth, populated entirely by vicious criminals and corrupt cops.

Thankfully, there's another element to this tale which makes it praiseworthy - the story and screenplay credit for James Ellroy, the celebrated novelist whose work provided the source material for 1997's masterful LA Confidential. While this film doesn't approach the sheer depth of character and artful plotting of that masterpiece, Ellroy's imput does at least  complicate Ayer's simplistic worldview.
 
Keanu Reeves is a loose cannon cop, "the spear on the tip" as his superior calls him, a blunt instrument who kills the worst criminals. The almost too clever opening sequence of the film sees a dishevelled boozing Reeves attempt to sell a machine gun from the back of his car to Korean gangsters who beat him up and steal said car after he unleashes a slew of racial epithets. Reeves tracks them to their house, retrieves a concealed gun and body armour from his car and blows the Korean villains away to save two teenage girls they had kidnapped. He then carefully stages the scene to make it look like they shot first, the "exigent circumstances" which allow him to act on his Dirty Harry impulses without legal consequences.

But, just like the implacable Harry Callahan, Reeve's Detective Tom Ludlow is powered as much by his tremendous sense of justice as by vengeance. When wrongly implicated in the murder of his former partner, Reeves can't let it go. He jeopardises the elaborate cover-up by his friends in the department in his single-minded search to find out who the cop-killers are by painstaking detective work before killing them for their crime. This part of the film is superb as Ludlow's good qualities act as a tragic flaw hastening his own downfall.
 
A fine cast sees Chris Evans stand out as Detective Diskin, who helps Ludlow while being shocked by his tactics. Hugh Laurie is nicely sinister as the head of Internal Affairs but Forest Whitaker is quite awful as Ludlow's boss - his dialogue is so many cop movie clichés strung together that it actually becomes unintentionally hilarious.
 
Ultimately though this is Reeves' film and this is one of his best roles. Ludlow's unstoppable thirst for answers and vengeance, regardless of the consequences for himself, causes him to stumble into a much bigger conspiracy which reveals to him that his violent tendencies may have been exploited by smarter people... Sadly at this point labyrinthine noir gives way to a simplistic Hollywood ending. But despite its flaws this is grittiness well worth seeing.
 
Fergal Casey