There's a tinge of complacency inherent in the simplistic moral schemes of all melodramas, left and right. They work by attributing problems in the world to the nefarious machinations of purely evil characters and getting us to seethe in hatred and resentment of such characters; then they gratifying us by clobbering the baddies in a way we feel never happens in real life. If you go for it, you have to ignore some ugly implications, in particular the satisfaction we're meant to take in the avenging violence against the villain and his minions--who we know have committed the crimes but have not yet entered the legal system for prosecuting crime. Dark Blue is relatively civilized in that the good guys go after Gleeson by legal means, and Russell arrests rather than kills one of his pair of scumbag killers. The black one. The white one, however, is stomped by a black street mob during the riots, saving Russell the trouble of pursuing and arresting him. And the moviemakers, who plainly would be horrified by the lynching of an African-American, even an alleged criminal, lead us to feel that the guy got his.

Melodrama exists to be effective and obviously can be enjoyable, and Dark Blue is often fairly well shot. (The staging of the L.A. riots has a dream-Mogadishu feel.) Kurt Russell, a good, natural actor, is also an asset, but the part doesn't come together for him. He's been at his best in the comedies Used Cars (1980), Swing Shift (1984), and The Best of Times (1986; written by Shelton), in which his basically likeable quality, a quality his characters know how to sell, is layered with disappointment. In the opening scenes of Dark Blue, celebrating his successful perjury to a review board investigating the shooting of a criminal suspect, he's trying too hard to be scary-tough, coarse, desensitized. Russell may not have the kind of malevolence the role calls for, he may just be too good of a guy. But he's further undone because the movie is using his aging-jock bonhomie against him, squeezing him til he oinks.

The movie dares us not to like him and then counts on the fact that we will anyway. As a result there are elements of his character that fall on both sides of the melodramatic divide (in one scene he's protective of his nice-boy rookie partner, in another he sneers at his cowardice, etc.) with nothing in the script to suggest how they fit together. It would take the full resources of our greatest dramatic actors to do this structuring work without help from the script, and though I'm a fan that's not how I'd categorize Kurt Russell. (Watch Paul Newman as a cop caught up in a police scandal in Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981) to see what a master actor can accomplish even in a melodrama.)