Ron Shelton's Dark Blue opened and shut so fast earlier this year I had a feeling it must be better than the trailer made it look, which was like Training Day (2001) with the races of the good and bad cops reversed. I rented it as soon as it was released on video last week only to find that while it's more ambitious than Training Day, attempting as it does to link its story of a crooked, racist Los Angeles cop indirectly to the Rodney King beating and the L.A. riots that followed the acquittal of the police officers videotaped subduing King, it's even more terrible.

Training Day is a garish romance in which our identification with Ethan Hawke as the fledgling good knight is supposed to be eclipsed by our relish for the high style of Denzel Washington as the veteran evil knight who is both his mentor and tempter. Having worn an iron halo for years Washington seemed re-energized, but he's too wired right from the start, and without modulation. He plays an evil character the way Meryl Streep plays comedy: overly aware of how shocking the change of pace is, pouring it on until his character and the movie can barely hold their shape. I couldn't recover from his interaction with the rapists in the alley, where he's at his very showiest. Boy, he really steals that scene--from bit players with no lines. He calms down around Scott Glenn, I suspect because he guessed a canny veteran like Glenn could steal their scenes by underplaying them. Those are the only scenes in which he shows any discipline, and it's all motivated by circumstances outside the story. Otherwise, Washington makes star acting looking like a combination of vice and psychosis. (For vibey acting, I preferred Macy Gray's slow-building, unnerving performance in the small role of the woman who knows a rat when she sees Washington.)

David Ayer, the screenwriter of Training Day, also wrote Dark Blue (from a story by James Ellroy, the man who wrote the source novel that L.A. Confidential (1997) was adapted from), and like the earlier movies Dark Blue shows in detail the dirty work of L.A. cops. Here the focus is on Kurt Russell as a racist redneck member of the elite Special Investigations Squad (SIS). His forte comes into play when the actual perpetrators of crimes can't be caught: he matches known criminals to the crimes well enough to get a judge to sign a warrant and then leads the sieges of the men's houses in order to make sure they get killed during the arrest.

Very bad behavior, yes, but what's the connection between Russell's racism, his illegal acts, and the Rodney King riots? Russell's speech and actions are objectionable, but he acts under the direction of Brendan Gleeson as his superior in the SIS whose motive is greed, not racism. The dirty work we witness in the course of the movie has Russell finding substitute perps for a black-and-white pair of psychos who commit a bloodbath while robbing a store at Gleeson's behest. Dark Blue is done in by the very thing that finally made the sleek, moody L.A. Confidential so hollow. Both movies want to get at something essential about Southern Californian rot. L.A. Confidential presents its own erotic-obsessive view of L.A. as revelatory of the entangled corruption of the police, the city government, vice lords, and the entertainment industry, while Dark Blue adopts the tone of a hard-hitting journalistic exposé. But in both cases the bad guy behind it all is a straight melodramatic villain, an evil man hiding behind his power within the police department and acting entirely for personal gain. This tells you nothing about racism, in the LAPD or anywhere else. It doesn't even explain police corruption.