I wonder whether — Soldier notwithstanding — Kurt Russell can make a bad film. Certainly many of his films are lightweight, but I don’t remember any that were particularly bad. Overboard for comedy, Executive Decision for action, Stargate and The Thing ⁽¹⁾ for science-fiction … and now he gets the chance to play a thoroughly unlikeable bent cop in Dark Blue.

It is a bad time for the LAPD. Some scofflaw has videotaped four white cops using their nightsticks to beat the shit out of black speeder Rodney King. The department has done damage-control by getting the cops’ trials moved out to lily-white Simi Valley, ⁽²⁾ but the Los Angeles basin is a tinderbox waiting to explode when the “not guilty” verdicts come in.

Eldon Perry (Russell) is an old-time cop on the force, a “cowboy” and the offspring and descendant of other police “cowboys”. He drinks, he kills (as necessary), he is not above planting a little evidence to ensure a conviction or prove (if the perpetrator is no longer around to be convicted) that any action he may have taken was justified. He has a young partner, Bobby Keough (Scott Speedman). Right now, Bobby is up before a panel because he fired his gun and killed a perp. The panel, with the sole exception of black Deputy Chief Arthur Holland (Ving Rhames; aka “Affirmatron” to his peers — though they don’t consider him a peer), exonerates him. This decision is not harmed by the fact that Bobby is a nephew of Jack Van Meter (Brendan Gleeson), the old man of the SIS for which Eldon and Bobby work. Jack, like Eldon, is of the old school.

But where Eldon is bent, Jack is thoroughly twisted; he has a pair of hit men to whom he reveals the location of stashed criminal money; they rip it off, and the three of them then divide the take. One such stash is in a safe behind the wall of a child’s bedroom above a Korean-owned convenience store; the store owner is heavily into the numbers racket. The two men break into the store, blow the lady behind the counter away, and then, while one of them goes upstairs and spends much frustrating time getting at the safe, the other carefully snuffs anybody else who comes into the store, no matter how innocent their errand. The resulting massacre, of course, has the L.A. Basin in an uproar, and it is incumbent upon Eldon and Bobby, who are assigned to the case, to find and dispose of the perpetrators as quickly as possible. Naturally, Jack is unenthused about the possibility that they might track down the real perpetrators — and himself — and so he directs them to create a couple of culprits, and bring the case to a quick and satisfying conclusion, without the need of involving the judicial system.

There’s a romance subplot — Bobby has fallen in love with Sergeant Beth Williamson (Michael Michele), who works for Deputy Chief Holland and at one time had a fling with him — and Holland is out to get Eldon and Bobby, whom he sees as part of a dangerous traditional violent element in the force.

The climax works itself out against the background of the Rodney King riots; the final scene shows Los Angeles in flames.

This was, again, a good film — the sort of workmanlike movie we’ve come to expect from Russell. Dragnet it’s not, however, a point which the LAPD evidently recognized when they refused to cooperate in its filming. Enjoy.

⁽¹⁾ John Carpenter’s The Thing took a lot of flak from the critics, twenty years ago, because it was “untrue” to its original, Howard Hawks’ 1950 The Thing. What the critics never understood, not having ever cracked an actual book, was that Carpenter’s excellent and terrifying film was far more faithful to the original story (John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”) that Hawks’ movie was.

⁽²⁾ A similar move was made, to “good” effect, years later for the civil action against O.J. Simpson in the deaths of his wife and Ron Goldberg. After a jury that was only 75% white acquitted him — not merely failed to find him guilty — of murder, the civil action was used to punish him for the murders, of which he was officially innocent, by turning him into a pauper.