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.)
The script is lumpy all the way through. Russell's big confession scene at the end is, by Shelton's admission in a March 2002 interview with Carlo Cavagna of AboutFilm, crammed with back story because they "couldn't figure out another way to do it". Lolita Davidovich as Russell's wife has several hopeless scenes, one in which she has to act unhappy and then explain what we've just seen in a theatrical aside, as if we'd miss why she drinks, and another one in which she peculiarly reads an overexplicit farewell note to Russell out loud to him.
The African-American characters who fight the good fight are so incorruptible they don't seem rooted in the world the way the compromised whites do. Which isn't to say they're very appealing. Ving Rhames in the nearly unwritten part of the upright assistant chief is awfully ominous and brooding for the representative of uncompromising morality. The movie acknowledges one flaw in him--adultery--but mitigates it in a hilariously crisp list of legalisms. I detected a few more flaws: he's about as humorless, self-righteous, and impolitic a police chief as you could imagine. Though he's meant to be utterly pure of motive he comes across like Captain Ahab, and I could never figure out whether this was intended by the makers or something Rhames did because he had to do something.
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