Cop fight

The frayed-at-the-edges energy of Kurt Russell in Dark Blue makes him beguilingly credible in the role of a freewheeling, special-units cop in the LAPD. His gimpy swagger befits a cocky, veteran rule-bender who boasts of being a “gunfighter raised in a family of gunfighters,” and in the moments when that still-boyish smile fades, the haggard look around the eyes evokes the growing pressure from a long history of dirty secrets and worse.

Moral muddles with sharp edges on them make all the difference in Ron Shelton’s new film, and Russell’s dynamics and presence keep things afloat as the film bolts from crime thriller to character study to social commentary to revenge tragedy and back again. The high-profile topic here is the unraveling of corruption in the LAPD during the era of the Rodney King case in the early 1990s, but the film is at its best when it’s showing us the adjustable, split-level status of “truth” within the pervasively corrupted world in which Eldon Perry (Russell) lives and works.

Perry and his young partner Bobby Keough (Scott Speedman) are investigating a multiple homicide at a liquor store, and an ambitious assistant chief (Ving Rhames) is investigating the two of them in connection with the killing of a suspect in their previous case. Perry’s marriage to a jail employee (Lolita Davidovitch) is coming apart, and Keough is having a semi-anonymous fling with a comely policewoman (Michael Michele) who tries, unsuccessfully, to keep business and pleasure separate.

Hovering over all of this is Perry’s superior (Brendan Gleeson), a devious glad-handing figure who is walking both sides of the street. His inexplicably abrupt shift from Machiavellian mastermind to standard-issue receptacle of mindless evil is one of the movie’s missteps but perhaps a necessary one, since it permits some moral closure and a grand gesture of redemption amid the crossfire of all these morally compromised characters.

In fits and starts, Dark Blue is a hard-ass action flick, but it’s at its best with the bonhomie and bullshitting of male professionals, albeit in a somewhat different vein from that mastered by Shelton in his sports movies Bull Durham, Tin Cup and White Men Can’t Jump. But the domestic scenes show commendable daring in their shifts of tone; the break-up scene between Russell and Davidovitch is like the run-through on a test scene for an acting class.

And while the final sequence provides some satisfying and much-needed moral closure and a little bit of hindsight historical wisdom to boot, there’s something very odd about a pulsating action drama reaching its climax in a scene in which everyone sits around and listens while the hero makes a supposedly extemporaneous speech and fails to hide the impression that he is indulging in carefully scripted grandstanding.