Down-and-dirty 'Dark Blue' weaves a thoroughly engrossing tale

Ron Shelton's "Dark Blue" is another harrowingly cynical dirty-cop movie in the recent tradition of "Training Day" and "Narc." Yet it's so much more complex, engrossing and satisfying than those films that the comparison is not entirely fair.

MOVIE REVIEW

DARK BLUE

DIRECTOR: Ron Shelton

CAST: Kurt Russell, Ving Rhames, Brendan Gleeson, Scott Speedman

RUNNING TIME: 118 minutes

RATING: R for violence

WHERE: Cinema 17, East Valley 13, Everett 9, Factoria, Galleria 11, Gateway 8, Grand Cinemas, Issaquah 9, Lewis & Clark, Longston Place 14, Marysville 14, Meridian 16, Monroe 12, Mountlake 9, Redmond Town Center, Woodinville 12

GRADE: B+

Its screenplay is by David Ayer, who wrote "Training Day," but it's based on a story by James Ellroy, the author of "L.A. Confidential," and, spiritually, it's a remake of that celebrated film noir, transplanted from the complacent mid-'50s to the Los Angeles of the edgy early '90s.

Like its model, it's such an exaggeration of the day-to-day corruption in the LAPD that it probably amounts to criminal libel, but somehow this excess doesn't detract from its power as a character study, a morality tale or a nail-biting political thriller.

Opening with a nocturnal police chase that gradually segues into the infamous Rodney King video, the story takes place during the days when the city is grimly awaiting the outcome of the ensuing police-brutality trial and vaguely anticipating a riot.

The main character is police Sgt. Eldon Perry (Kurt Russell), a member of the department's elite Special Investigations Squad who routinely assaults citizens, plants false evidence and is not above murdering a suspect when he thinks it appropriate.

There's also his younger partner (Scott Speedman) who, under Perry's tutelage, is well on his way to similar corruption; their even more monstrously venal SIS boss (Brendan Gleeson); and a squeaky-clean assistant police chief (Ving Rhames) who wants to bring them down.

The movie chronicles how Perry's investigation into the bloody heist of a Korean grocery store becomes an orgy of coverup, compromise and growing self-awareness that gradually brings him to the edge and becomes a metaphor for the city's larger awakening.

Its implausible ending aside, the screenplay is extraordinary: multilayered in theme, novelistic in scope, filled with Ellroyan irony, ambience and dialogue, and particularly skillful in the way it plays its action climax off the Rodney King riots.

As Perry, Russell gives the performance of his career. Never considered much of a dramatic actor, he's a revelation here as a complicated, well-meaning man who has, as his estranged wife (Lolita Davidovich) tells him, "descended into hell."

The movie is also a change of pace and big comeback for director Shelton, best known for his sports comedies ("Bull Durham," "Tin Cup") and long off the A-list. He weaves the familiar elements of what might have been one more cop-noir into a Shakespearean tragedy and epic vision of the American apocalyptic.