What does the messy, violent, compelling 'Street Kings' remind us of? L.A., of course

The Keanu Reeves cop movie "Street Kings" is a viscerally compelling but thematically confused mess of an action noir that plumbs new depths of cynicism about contemporary American life in general and the Los Angeles Police Department in particular.

Gosh knows, the post-Rodney King LAPD has (and no doubt deserves) a bad image, but it's portrayed in this bloodbath as a run-amok band of fiendish, rapist-murderer-extortionists somewhere between the Gestapo and a Salvadoran death squad.

Reeves plays one of its more homicidal officers: a revenge-hungry, widower detective who we first meet on an average day in which, in the rescue of two abducted children, he blows away a half-dozen suspects and plants evidence like confetti.

The plot-point comes when his former partner in their elite unit, fed-up with the corruption, squeals to Internal Affairs. Shortly thereafter, he's murdered and the hero is put on the trail of a Matterhorn of corruption: more than even HE can stomach.

As a mystery, a shoot-'em-up and a nightmarish vision of urban hell, "Street Kings" holds your interest from start to finish. It's also a decent star vehicle for Reeves, who's at his best playing a low-growling automaton with a gun.

But what is this movie telling us?

On the one hand, director David Ayer -- who wrote "Training Day," and clearly feels something for the ghetto-oppressed -- is appalled by the epic police brutality his movie goes out of its way to chronicle in virtually every frame.

On the other hand, screenwriter/author James Ellroy ("The Black Dahlia") is a fervent supporter (and honorary member) of the LAPD and when he says, in his author's message, America needs hit men like this to control its urban scum, he's not being ironic: he means it.

It's hard to recall another time when the cross-purposes of two collaborating filmmakers of a major film has been quite so evident, or when the theme of the movie itself has been so totally schizophrenic -- half populist outrage, half Nazi.