Unfortunately, Street Kings’ script — good Lord, who tinkered with that? — lets the actors down. I realize the dialogue is supposed to be somewhat stylized, but style isn't what I got; I got the most clichés riddling the dialogue I've heard in a long while and unfortunately, not because the movie is parodying a genre. The writers took the kind of lines a movie needs really great writing to get away with once and gave those lines to characters with a frequency that defies belief. Besides being off-putting on the believability front, the dialogue didn't give us much of a peek into the players because there were so many opaque or just silly lines at crucial moments, while key lines were sometimes thrown away, lessening their impact. One shouldn’t have to strain to hear Ludow's boss, Captain Wander (an over-the-top Forest Whitaker), say that Tom is always Tom, and once fixed on a problem, he never gives up, because although the vice captain has been capitalizing on this trait for years, he’s caught as flatfooted by it as any criminal.

Whitaker’s take on Wander misfires for most of the film, though he pulls off his end scene. We should join Ludlow in being torn as Biggs and Wander fight over him, one with an arm around Tom’s shoulders, the other in shadow from the sidelines. But Wander has such a psychotic vibe from his opening scene, we’re left instead to wonder why Ludlow is, as one of his team mates puts it, such a chump about the men he works with, especially given his role on the squad.

That leaves the field to Biggs, but we don’t get enough of him to fill the space that should be occupied by Wander. To effectively illuminate the murkiness of the culture charged with enforcing morality, we need to see through Wander’s eyes, too. Our distance from that key character weakens the sense of irony about concepts like good and evil underpinning the story. The movie almost makes it as a genuinely troubling moral as well as physical landscape, and that's probably the most disappointing aspect.