Grade:  D

Director:  Ron Shelton		Released:  February 2003
Writer:  David Ayer, James Ellroy		MPAA Rating:  R
Players:  Kurt Russell, Ving Rhames, Scott Speedman		Running time:  118 minutes

Ratings System

Warning: do not hire the casting director of Dark Blue to cast your movie.  Virtually every major role is miscast.  To start, Kurt Russell is in a role that requires menace.  Kurt Russell is not menacing, he's too jokey and light-hearted for that.  The best he can manage in this role is to raise his voice to show his anger.  Raised voices aren't scary, simmering intensity is scary.  (Don't mistake this to mean I don't like Kurt Russell.  I do.  just not in this picture)

There are two cops in this flick whose wives are leaving them.  First of all, this is the biggest stereotype in cop movies.  Second of all, it's not just one wife leaving, it's two, which is of course, twice as annoying.  Third of all, the movie doesn't give me a reason to care that these women are getting out of their marriages, leaving me with a desire to push fast forward on the remote.  With one of the wives, in her very first scene, she announces she wants to leave.  And I'm supposed to care, why?  I have nothing invested in these characters, I wouldn't care if they wanted to have roman orgies in Central Park.  This is dumb film-making.

Another stupid plot device Dark Blue uses is when one character who is sleeping with another character doesn't know the first character's last name.  They make a big point of her not knowing what his name is, so that later when she is assigned to look into something, she doesn't know who she's looking into, but the viewer knows, and the viewer knows it's lame.  Dark Blue is full of weak shit like that.

Dark Blue is clearly supposed to be the next Training Day, but it's not even close.  See Narc and Training Day, skip Dark Blue. (By the way, what's with all the similarities between this and Narc?  I think there was some borrowing from one script to the other)

- crocoPuffs