If you’ve ever read a novel by James Ellroy, you’ll know L.A. was built on the backs of its corrupt police force. Ellroy mined this material extensively in his novel L.A. Confidential and its subsequent filmed adaptation, but in Dark Blue the historical context has changed to explore the events surrounding the Rodney King beating.
After a dazzling video replay of the horrific 1992 footage, we find ourselves in a motel room with Sgt. Eldon Perry Jr. (played by Kurt Russell). As he locks and loads his array of weaponry and takes a shot of whiskey from the bedside table, it’s abundantly clear he is the latest in a series of rogue cops who work outside the system in order to catch and punish the bad guys.
However, as a third-generation police officer, he lives in a time when the means of catching the crook aren’t as cut-and-dried as in his grandfather’s days.
In 1992, a week before the King verdict, race relations threaten to tear the city apart and the force’s methods are under intense scrutiny. When Perry, with his rookie partner Bobby Keogh (Canada’s own Scott Speedman), is assigned a seemingly routine multiple homicide at a convenience store, he uncovers a plot that not only implicates his boss, but also his willing role as an accomplice in this scheme. Inspired by his partner’s overall good nature and a divorce that comes in the middle of the plot, Perry must dig his way out of the hole he built for himself, and take down as many people as he can along the way in the name of justice.
Dark Blue is too complicated for its own good. It’s a good cop/bad cop story, then a love story, then a story of redemption, then a story of corruption, and on top of everything else it tries to explore the factors that led to the Rodney King beating and the subsequent riot. As a result, it does none of these plots justice. It seems as if the filmmakers have tried to condense a sprawling novel into the span of a ninety-minute film without attempting to trim any of the fat, resulting in plot elements that come out of left field. The main deficiency is in the L.A. riot material, which is omnipresent as background commentary on the various television sets on screen. As a pivotal scene takes place in the film, we watch the parallel action of the growing riot, but rather than being an all-consuming plot point, it is merely a device, used by the filmmaker as an obstacle that Perry must drive through or pathetic fallacy that reflects how mad he is.
For this reason, the film ends up subverting what it pretends to investigate. The opening grainy video images of the Rodney King beating bring us back to the terrible events of 1991 and 1992, but instead of exploring them, the filmmakers leave them as window dressing for a sub-par genre film.
Rather than answering any of the important questions surrounding the event, it irresponsibly stirs up the murky waters underneath.
