Street Kings: a double dose of eye-candy!
So I went to see Street Kings today. It was a toss-up between that, Escape from Huang Shi (for Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and The Other Boleyn Girl, ALL of which opened on the same day - this past Thursday. Good Lord. But in the end, we decided to go with Street Kings, because of the double dose of eye-candy: Keanu Reeves and Chris Evans. Yeah, I'm shallow. xP
I'm still deciding if I should watch The Other Boleyn Girl. I love Natalie Portman, and I'm interested to see her portrayal of Anne Boleyn, but on the other hand, having read the book a few months ago, I'm afraid that the movie will not match up to my expectations and I'd hate it. LOL. Besides, it's hard for me to picture anyone else but Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII since I watched The Tudors. :P
Anyways, I thought Street Kings was pretty good. Sure, it was full of profanities (liberal use of Eff-yous) and violence, but I liked the storyline. I guess I just have a thing for thrilling cop movies. :P I thought Keanu Reeves put in a great performance! For once, he was not as monotonous as he is in his other movies. He sure whacked a lot of people in this movie. His character will probably gonna be wallowing in therapy for years.
And now I come to Chris Evans. Oh, Chris! What can I say? The guy's an absolute hunk. Better yet, he's a hunk who can ACT his ass off. I've had a crush on him ever since I saw the first Fantastic Four movie, and my impression of him has only improved since then. Especially after I saw Sunshine - WOW. I love Chris. :D
[SPOILERS AHEAD: Don't read if you plan on watching Street Kings!]
So, the film starts off with Tom Ludlow (Keanu) on an undercover mission to save two missing Korean girls. He finds the guys (Korean gangstas) responsible, storms the house on his own and basically guns all the bad guys down, and fabricating evidence along the way - that they opened fire and he fought back, when in reality he caught them by surprise.
I'm pretty sure that I dropped the F-bomb when Tom fired the first shot. What? I was caught by surprise! LOL.
He manages to rescue the two girls, and we find out that he was acting on orders of his captain, Wander (Forest Whitaker). The guys on his team (Amaury Nolasco, Jay Mohr and some other guy) come in and give him a little grief about acting all on his own. Profanities and insults ensue.
It seems that he's got a beef with his ex-partner, Washington, but we don't know what the beef is about. Wander orders Tom not to go near Washington, and to go to the hospital to get checked out (he caught a bullet, but was wearing a bullet-proof vest), so that he doesn't have to talk to all those people outside the crime scene. Over at the hospital, a man (Hugh Laurie) asks him questions about what happened earlier, and claims that he's working in insurance. Tom doesn't reveal anything important, and the man is revealed to be Captain Biggs, of Internal Affairs. Dun dun dun. We also see that Tom has a girlfriend, who works as a nurse in the hospital.
So anyway, Tom finds out from Wander that Washington has been talking to Biggs, and assumes that he's ratting him out. He wants to confront Washington, but Wander holds him back. Later, he follows Washington, and he stops at a convenience store. As Tom is about to follow him in, he spots two thugs pulling up and they're armed with AKs. He pulls his gun and sneaks in, but Washington gets the drop on him and assumes that Tom has come to kill him. He tries to warn Washington about the two thugs, but he does not believe Tom, until the two thugs open fire and kill the cashier. Tom and Washington quickly take cover and try to return fire. Tom accidentally shoots Washington in the shoulder, although he does not realize this until much later.
The two thugs approach Washington and empty their clips into him. Yes, he is shot VERY brutally. Tom can only watch while his ex-partner dies. The calvary arrives, and Tom is in deep shit. People are going to assume that Tom hired two thugs off the street to kill his ex-partner, to stop him from ratting him out. Of course, that's not true. Wander not-so-subtly hints to Tom to make the security video disappear, which catches him on tape at the scene while it went down. They are going to cover it up by saying that Tom was first on the scene. Wander decides to transfer Tom out of the unit temporarily to keep the heat off, and he gets dropped in the Complaints department. Hahaha.
Enter Paul Diskant (Chris Evans), who is the homicide detective heading up the case. He doesn't turn up until more than half an hour into the film, I think. Woe. Anyway, he has been told by Tom's colleagues to make the case go away - i.e. make sure that Tom is in no way implicated. So, he's a little annoyed. Tom looks him up to find out what he's got so far, but Diskant refuses to tell him anything, at first. Something funny: Tom starts calling him "Disco" after their first meeting, even his name is entered as that in Tom's phone. LOL!
Later, Diskant finds some dirt on Washington and concludes that the guy was probably dirty. He relays this info to Tom, in secret, in the men's bathroom. Tom asks Diskant to keep this a secret, to which Diskant replies, "Why do you think I'm telling you this in the bathroom?" Oh, Chris... <3<3<3 Before that, though, the two men have a bit of a scuffle. Which was kinda hot. HEH! So they end up sort of working together to track down the two shooters.
Funny bits:
~ Tom and Diskant go to the last known address of the two shooters, and finds that they haven't lived there for a while, another family has moved in there. Tom sees a group of people hanging outside a house across the street, and he wants to try and shake them down, see who runs, that's the person they want to talk to. Diskant says, "What, you bored or something?"
~ As Tom is driving like a maniac through the streets of LA, Diskant is practically freaking out and constantly shouting at Tom as he narrowly misses cars and pedastrians. We find out that Diskant is engaged, and he says in response to Tom's crazy driving, "And I'd like to see her again, thank you." LMAO!
~ Tom and Diskant storm a guy's house to get some info from him, and when Tom doesn't get the answers he wanted, he takes a phonebook and starts whacking the guy's head with it. OUCH. Diskant tries unsuccessfully to stop him. Chris Evans did a fantastic job with his expressions here, you could really see what was going on in his character's head.
~ They go see a guy who may know where the two guys are, and Tom talks to the guy while Diskant keeps his gun trained on him. However, they are soon surrounded by a small group of gangsters (I think) and Diskant gets stuck with keeping an eye on those guys, who are standing in two different directions - in front and behind him. Diskant gets antsy and starts dropping F-bombs, warning the guys to stay away. He also get slightly stressed out from having to watch both his front and behind.
Anyway. They managed to find their hideout, as well as two dead bodies buried in the ground - the two shooters. But here's the thing: they've been dead for a while now, which makes it impossible for them to have been involved in the shooting. So they're looking for two ghosts.
They manage find a lead, and prepare to take action - off the record, if you know what I mean. Tom wants revenge for what happened, and he wants to clear his name. Before he goes off to meet the two people, he hands the security video over to Washington's widow, because he wants her to know the truth - saying that he knows what it feels like to not know.
It is revealed earlier that his wife is dead, though we don't know how. In this scene, he reveals that his wife was with another man when she died. She had a blood clot in her brain which ruptured, and the man she was with brought her to the hospital and left her there. She later died, alone, on the streets outside the hospital.
He goes to the station to load up on ammo. He also decides that he should go alone, and Diskant should stay behind, but Diskant insists on going along. Tom chucks a heavy machine gun to Diskant (it literally lands on his chest) and they get going. Before they get into the car, Captain Biggs pulls up and drops them a warning. He also hints that Washington may not have been ratting Tom out, but someone else. (I think. I can't quite remember the dialogue.)
While in the car, he gets Diskant to switch out the bullets in the guns, so that the ballistic evidence wouldn't come back to their department-issue weapons. Diskant says, "So we're just going to go in there and kill them?" and Tom replies, "No. I'm going to ask them some questions, then I'm gonna kill them."
I was like, "Hey! Don't go teaching the boy bad things!" LOL.
Anyway, they go in and the tension is high. Turns out that they know who Tom is; they were the ones that shot Washington. They banter back and forth, until Diskant realizes something and opens his big mouth - he knows who the two men are. However, before he can really reveal anything, he is shot. IN THE FREAKIN' NECK. OH SHIT! So he falls, and a shootout occurs and the two guys are gunned down by Tom, who takes a bullet to the shoulder. He tries to save Diskant, but it's too late. He watches Diskant take his last breath. Tom then escapes the house (leaving my poor Diskant behind) and goes to his girlfriend's place. She turns on the TV and Tom finds out that he's been tagged as a wanted man, and that the two men he killed were undercover police officers.
His girlfriend stops him from leaving, but then two of his colleagues storm in and cuff him. He assumes they are driving him downtown, but discovers that they are heading in a different direction. It's revealed that they are the dirty ones. In fact, the whole unit is dirty, including their captain, Wander. Tom is stunned, as the two guys threaten to hurt his girlfriend and Washington's widow. While the two guys are talking about how they planned the whole thing, Tom manages to unlock his handcuffs using a hidden key, and attacks the one driving, by stabbing the guy with the opened end of his handcuffs. (If that makes sense. Just know that it was violent, and bloody.) So the car swerves out of control, and the other guy tries to get Tom off of the one driving. He manages to knock Tom out and he awakens to find his hands and legs tied up, and the two men are getting DNA samples and fingerprints from him. (That's how they framed the two dead thugs for the killing of Washington.)
They are at the location where Tom and Diskant found the two bodies. So Tom tries to crawl away while the two guys are shooting at the ground, taunting him. Tom falls into the makeshift grave where the two dead thugs were buried. One of the guys catches up to him and Tom manages to grab an axe that was lying nearby and whacks him in the head with it. He then grabs his gun and shoots the other dirty cop dead - who is played by Amaury Nolasco.
I don't know how Tom managed to untie himself, but he does and drives to Washington's house to check on his widow. He's almost too late, as Jay Mohr (don't recall the character's name) is already there and is terrorizing the poor woman, asking (well, demanding) for the security video of Washington's shooting. She is a tough one, spitting at his face and refuses to say anything. He hits her and is presumably about to do more terrible things to her, when she spots Tom approaching from outside. He bursts in and subdues Jay Mohr. He tells Mrs. Washington that she has to leave. She replies that she's already packed.
Tom heads to Wander's house next, to confront his once-best friend. He can't believe that Wander would do this to him. Wander tries to rationalize his actions, but Tom is not having any of that. They get into a scuffle, and Tom gets the upper hand, handcuffing Wander to the stair-post (is that what you call it? I dunno.) Wander starts rambling, and he tells Tom to break through the wall which holds all his plaques and stuff. Tom does so, and inside the wall sits a ton of money and other things which Wander and the other guys have skimmed from raids and things like that.
So, Tom ends up shooting Wander. He calls Biggs up to tell him what he's done, and Biggs arrives at Wander's house. He's been trying to make a case against Wander for some time now, but never got really far. Basically, Tom was sort of used by him to take Wander out, because Biggs predicted that this was what he would do when Tom finally opened his eyes to what the guys in his unit were doing.
I was like, "Uhhh...a little extreme, no?"
Anyway, Biggs says that he'll take care of things - i.e. the mother of all cover-ups - and that Tom will not be implicated, and he can go on being a cop.
The movie ends with Tom looking into the sunset. LOL.
That's it. At least, I think I've got most of the plot. It's a wonder that I even remember so much of it, since it usually takes a second viewing for me to able to completely describe the plot. :P
I still hate that Chris Evans' character died. Hmph. And in such a brutal way, in mid-sentence! It kind of reminded me of Cedric's death in Goblet of Fire. They both died before anyone knew what the fuck was going on. Haha. But he was so YUMMY in the movie. I need to procure some Chris Evans icons. :D No shirtless scenes, though. Most of the time he was either in a suit and tie, or t-shirt and pants. I loved his casual look. The t-shirt was pretty tight, you could see muscles. WHOO! And his hair, I love his close-cropped look. I hope he keeps that look for a LOOOOONG time.
* EDIT: Added some stuff that I thought up after I'd hit the post button. :P
I'm still deciding if I should watch The Other Boleyn Girl. I love Natalie Portman, and I'm interested to see her portrayal of Anne Boleyn, but on the other hand, having read the book a few months ago, I'm afraid that the movie will not match up to my expectations and I'd hate it. LOL. Besides, it's hard for me to picture anyone else but Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII since I watched The Tudors. :P
Anyways, I thought Street Kings was pretty good. Sure, it was full of profanities (liberal use of Eff-yous) and violence, but I liked the storyline. I guess I just have a thing for thrilling cop movies. :P I thought Keanu Reeves put in a great performance! For once, he was not as monotonous as he is in his other movies. He sure whacked a lot of people in this movie. His character will probably gonna be wallowing in therapy for years.
And now I come to Chris Evans. Oh, Chris! What can I say? The guy's an absolute hunk. Better yet, he's a hunk who can ACT his ass off. I've had a crush on him ever since I saw the first Fantastic Four movie, and my impression of him has only improved since then. Especially after I saw Sunshine - WOW. I love Chris. :D
[SPOILERS AHEAD: Don't read if you plan on watching Street Kings!]
So, the film starts off with Tom Ludlow (Keanu) on an undercover mission to save two missing Korean girls. He finds the guys (Korean gangstas) responsible, storms the house on his own and basically guns all the bad guys down, and fabricating evidence along the way - that they opened fire and he fought back, when in reality he caught them by surprise.
I'm pretty sure that I dropped the F-bomb when Tom fired the first shot. What? I was caught by surprise! LOL.
He manages to rescue the two girls, and we find out that he was acting on orders of his captain, Wander (Forest Whitaker). The guys on his team (Amaury Nolasco, Jay Mohr and some other guy) come in and give him a little grief about acting all on his own. Profanities and insults ensue.
It seems that he's got a beef with his ex-partner, Washington, but we don't know what the beef is about. Wander orders Tom not to go near Washington, and to go to the hospital to get checked out (he caught a bullet, but was wearing a bullet-proof vest), so that he doesn't have to talk to all those people outside the crime scene. Over at the hospital, a man (Hugh Laurie) asks him questions about what happened earlier, and claims that he's working in insurance. Tom doesn't reveal anything important, and the man is revealed to be Captain Biggs, of Internal Affairs. Dun dun dun. We also see that Tom has a girlfriend, who works as a nurse in the hospital.
So anyway, Tom finds out from Wander that Washington has been talking to Biggs, and assumes that he's ratting him out. He wants to confront Washington, but Wander holds him back. Later, he follows Washington, and he stops at a convenience store. As Tom is about to follow him in, he spots two thugs pulling up and they're armed with AKs. He pulls his gun and sneaks in, but Washington gets the drop on him and assumes that Tom has come to kill him. He tries to warn Washington about the two thugs, but he does not believe Tom, until the two thugs open fire and kill the cashier. Tom and Washington quickly take cover and try to return fire. Tom accidentally shoots Washington in the shoulder, although he does not realize this until much later.
The two thugs approach Washington and empty their clips into him. Yes, he is shot VERY brutally. Tom can only watch while his ex-partner dies. The calvary arrives, and Tom is in deep shit. People are going to assume that Tom hired two thugs off the street to kill his ex-partner, to stop him from ratting him out. Of course, that's not true. Wander not-so-subtly hints to Tom to make the security video disappear, which catches him on tape at the scene while it went down. They are going to cover it up by saying that Tom was first on the scene. Wander decides to transfer Tom out of the unit temporarily to keep the heat off, and he gets dropped in the Complaints department. Hahaha.
Enter Paul Diskant (Chris Evans), who is the homicide detective heading up the case. He doesn't turn up until more than half an hour into the film, I think. Woe. Anyway, he has been told by Tom's colleagues to make the case go away - i.e. make sure that Tom is in no way implicated. So, he's a little annoyed. Tom looks him up to find out what he's got so far, but Diskant refuses to tell him anything, at first. Something funny: Tom starts calling him "Disco" after their first meeting, even his name is entered as that in Tom's phone. LOL!
Later, Diskant finds some dirt on Washington and concludes that the guy was probably dirty. He relays this info to Tom, in secret, in the men's bathroom. Tom asks Diskant to keep this a secret, to which Diskant replies, "Why do you think I'm telling you this in the bathroom?" Oh, Chris... <3<3<3 Before that, though, the two men have a bit of a scuffle. Which was kinda hot. HEH! So they end up sort of working together to track down the two shooters.
Funny bits:
~ Tom and Diskant go to the last known address of the two shooters, and finds that they haven't lived there for a while, another family has moved in there. Tom sees a group of people hanging outside a house across the street, and he wants to try and shake them down, see who runs, that's the person they want to talk to. Diskant says, "What, you bored or something?"
~ As Tom is driving like a maniac through the streets of LA, Diskant is practically freaking out and constantly shouting at Tom as he narrowly misses cars and pedastrians. We find out that Diskant is engaged, and he says in response to Tom's crazy driving, "And I'd like to see her again, thank you." LMAO!
~ Tom and Diskant storm a guy's house to get some info from him, and when Tom doesn't get the answers he wanted, he takes a phonebook and starts whacking the guy's head with it. OUCH. Diskant tries unsuccessfully to stop him. Chris Evans did a fantastic job with his expressions here, you could really see what was going on in his character's head.
~ They go see a guy who may know where the two guys are, and Tom talks to the guy while Diskant keeps his gun trained on him. However, they are soon surrounded by a small group of gangsters (I think) and Diskant gets stuck with keeping an eye on those guys, who are standing in two different directions - in front and behind him. Diskant gets antsy and starts dropping F-bombs, warning the guys to stay away. He also get slightly stressed out from having to watch both his front and behind.
Anyway. They managed to find their hideout, as well as two dead bodies buried in the ground - the two shooters. But here's the thing: they've been dead for a while now, which makes it impossible for them to have been involved in the shooting. So they're looking for two ghosts.
They manage find a lead, and prepare to take action - off the record, if you know what I mean. Tom wants revenge for what happened, and he wants to clear his name. Before he goes off to meet the two people, he hands the security video over to Washington's widow, because he wants her to know the truth - saying that he knows what it feels like to not know.
It is revealed earlier that his wife is dead, though we don't know how. In this scene, he reveals that his wife was with another man when she died. She had a blood clot in her brain which ruptured, and the man she was with brought her to the hospital and left her there. She later died, alone, on the streets outside the hospital.
He goes to the station to load up on ammo. He also decides that he should go alone, and Diskant should stay behind, but Diskant insists on going along. Tom chucks a heavy machine gun to Diskant (it literally lands on his chest) and they get going. Before they get into the car, Captain Biggs pulls up and drops them a warning. He also hints that Washington may not have been ratting Tom out, but someone else. (I think. I can't quite remember the dialogue.)
While in the car, he gets Diskant to switch out the bullets in the guns, so that the ballistic evidence wouldn't come back to their department-issue weapons. Diskant says, "So we're just going to go in there and kill them?" and Tom replies, "No. I'm going to ask them some questions, then I'm gonna kill them."
I was like, "Hey! Don't go teaching the boy bad things!" LOL.
Anyway, they go in and the tension is high. Turns out that they know who Tom is; they were the ones that shot Washington. They banter back and forth, until Diskant realizes something and opens his big mouth - he knows who the two men are. However, before he can really reveal anything, he is shot. IN THE FREAKIN' NECK. OH SHIT! So he falls, and a shootout occurs and the two guys are gunned down by Tom, who takes a bullet to the shoulder. He tries to save Diskant, but it's too late. He watches Diskant take his last breath. Tom then escapes the house (leaving my poor Diskant behind) and goes to his girlfriend's place. She turns on the TV and Tom finds out that he's been tagged as a wanted man, and that the two men he killed were undercover police officers.
His girlfriend stops him from leaving, but then two of his colleagues storm in and cuff him. He assumes they are driving him downtown, but discovers that they are heading in a different direction. It's revealed that they are the dirty ones. In fact, the whole unit is dirty, including their captain, Wander. Tom is stunned, as the two guys threaten to hurt his girlfriend and Washington's widow. While the two guys are talking about how they planned the whole thing, Tom manages to unlock his handcuffs using a hidden key, and attacks the one driving, by stabbing the guy with the opened end of his handcuffs. (If that makes sense. Just know that it was violent, and bloody.) So the car swerves out of control, and the other guy tries to get Tom off of the one driving. He manages to knock Tom out and he awakens to find his hands and legs tied up, and the two men are getting DNA samples and fingerprints from him. (That's how they framed the two dead thugs for the killing of Washington.)
They are at the location where Tom and Diskant found the two bodies. So Tom tries to crawl away while the two guys are shooting at the ground, taunting him. Tom falls into the makeshift grave where the two dead thugs were buried. One of the guys catches up to him and Tom manages to grab an axe that was lying nearby and whacks him in the head with it. He then grabs his gun and shoots the other dirty cop dead - who is played by Amaury Nolasco.
I don't know how Tom managed to untie himself, but he does and drives to Washington's house to check on his widow. He's almost too late, as Jay Mohr (don't recall the character's name) is already there and is terrorizing the poor woman, asking (well, demanding) for the security video of Washington's shooting. She is a tough one, spitting at his face and refuses to say anything. He hits her and is presumably about to do more terrible things to her, when she spots Tom approaching from outside. He bursts in and subdues Jay Mohr. He tells Mrs. Washington that she has to leave. She replies that she's already packed.
Tom heads to Wander's house next, to confront his once-best friend. He can't believe that Wander would do this to him. Wander tries to rationalize his actions, but Tom is not having any of that. They get into a scuffle, and Tom gets the upper hand, handcuffing Wander to the stair-post (is that what you call it? I dunno.) Wander starts rambling, and he tells Tom to break through the wall which holds all his plaques and stuff. Tom does so, and inside the wall sits a ton of money and other things which Wander and the other guys have skimmed from raids and things like that.
So, Tom ends up shooting Wander. He calls Biggs up to tell him what he's done, and Biggs arrives at Wander's house. He's been trying to make a case against Wander for some time now, but never got really far. Basically, Tom was sort of used by him to take Wander out, because Biggs predicted that this was what he would do when Tom finally opened his eyes to what the guys in his unit were doing.
I was like, "Uhhh...a little extreme, no?"
Anyway, Biggs says that he'll take care of things - i.e. the mother of all cover-ups - and that Tom will not be implicated, and he can go on being a cop.
The movie ends with Tom looking into the sunset. LOL.
That's it. At least, I think I've got most of the plot. It's a wonder that I even remember so much of it, since it usually takes a second viewing for me to able to completely describe the plot. :P
I still hate that Chris Evans' character died. Hmph. And in such a brutal way, in mid-sentence! It kind of reminded me of Cedric's death in Goblet of Fire. They both died before anyone knew what the fuck was going on. Haha. But he was so YUMMY in the movie. I need to procure some Chris Evans icons. :D No shirtless scenes, though. Most of the time he was either in a suit and tie, or t-shirt and pants. I loved his casual look. The t-shirt was pretty tight, you could see muscles. WHOO! And his hair, I love his close-cropped look. I hope he keeps that look for a LOOOOONG time.
* EDIT: Added some stuff that I thought up after I'd hit the post button. :P