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.
Melodrama is structurally incapable of telling you anything about the setting in which it takes place. (The best introduction to melodramatic narrative structure is Peter Brooks's work of literary history and criticism The Melodramatic Imagination, though the genre appeals to Brooks far more than it does to me.) A character who represents pure goodness, here Ving Rhames, goes up against a character who represents pure evil, Gleeson, and the plot leads to the triumphant public unmasking of the evil character, the villain.
To the extent Dark Blue has struck some people as complex it's because the star role occupies an intermediate position between good and evil. But such figures only make the melodrama more complicated on the surface. Russell does reprehensible things for the bad guy but at the climax he's the one who denounces the villain at a public ceremony. He's simply shuttled like an abacus bead from one end of the moral continuum to the other. The fact that the representative of morality is left out of the action only deforms the story. You wonder why he's there at all; it's not as if, but for his scowling presence, we might mistake Russell for a good cop. The climactic denunciation is the same scene as the one at the climax of The Fugitive (1993), which nobody took to be a serious exposé of pharmaceutical companies. No matter how explicitly the moviemakers state their intentions, the plot is about defeating some Halloween-masquerade devil, who is highly interchangeable from movie to movie.
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