Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Val Kilmer
50 Cents
Sharon Stone
Jose Pablo Cantillo
Directed By:
Charles Winkler
I don't always have a good reason to do things. Sometimes even, I like the do things for the stupidest reasons. I didn't have any logical reasons to watch STREETS OF BLOOD. I didn't know the director, it featured no actors I liked in the main roles and Netflix had a one star and a half rating for it. Those are telltale signs that are usually enough to keep me away from any movie. But the fucking flick is called STREETS OF BLOOD. I mean c'mon. I had to give it a try. That's some straight up memorabilia of those eighties action movies where everything exploded and characters swam in ketchup blood and styrofoam broken bones. The golden age of audiovisual violence. Did I find what I wanted in STREETS OF BLOOD? Not really. It doesn't matter what your intentions are, because if you don't know how to write a script, you can't escape your fate. A straight to video release that is better to forget or to watch in film class so that directors of the future won't repeat that terrible blunder.
The premise is seducing enough. STREETS OF BLOOD starts in New Orleans, in the trail of hurricane Katrina. The city is in ruins, the soldiers of Blackwater are driving people to anarchy and chaos and the police are left to fend for themselves (read Val Kilmer and 50 Cents). They could've made a complete movies on this, right there. But fast forward six months later and New Orleans isn't any better. The streets gangs have organized and have pretty much free reign over the city. They engage it terrible gangland violence in their own little soulless way (which probably leads to the most awesomely violent and soulless images in the movie) and in the midst of the battles, a DEA agents ends up shot. Executed by what seemed to be a pair of corrupted, violent cops. So a big inside investigation starts in the police department, with Dr. Nina Ferraro (Stone) a FBI profiler. The Feds are getting really pushy to debunk the rotten cops inside the New Orleans Police Department, but their spiritual leader Deveraux (Kilmer) knows the real fight is "out there" in the street of "his" city. So they start playing a game of cat and mouse, so that Deveraux can go after the "real" threat.
First of all, this movie had been shot with very low budget digital equipment. I have a hard time figuring out how they could've used more than two or three cameras that cost more than a few hundred dollars each. The image is almost of internet porn quality. That made for a few visually interesting scenes (the first scene, in the flood, wasn't half bad), but as a whole it just cheapens up the movie. I mean I wasn't exactly expecting a drama of Scorcesean magnitude, but the limitation of the camera and the limitations of the tech crew (who didn't believe in their tools) dragged the experience down. Also, no matter how hard the actors are trying, with a bad script, they're pretty much fucked from the start. Val Kilmer and Jose Pablo Cantillo (Ricky Verona from the barnburner CRANK) are giving decent performances, but they end up looking dumb, because they had dumb lines. They can't transcend their characters. Kiler has been hurting for work for many years and it shows. Also, what the fuck is Sharon Stone's problem in that movie? She doesn't even try to act. She's a capable actress normally, but all she does there is to parody bad acting. By far the worst performance of the movie, followed by 50 Cents who has an emotion range that goes from gangsta-angry to gangsta-angsty. Very subtle.
As much as I wanted to like STREETS OF BLOOD, the movie makes is impossible. There are a few of those so-bad-it's-good moments (there's this awesome girly fight in between Kilmer and a random gangbanger), but on a general level it's just good enough and it takes itself just seriously enough to remain bad. A little bit of self-depreciative humor could've worked wonders for STREETS OF BLOOD, but it was obviously done with the highest goals in mind. I can't tell you to watch it, but I can tell you that watching crap every now and then can help you appreciate cinema done right. The ideas behind the script a good, great even. But the writing is a ridiculous pastiche of everything that was ever done before and it's not even bothering with a decent, straightforward storyline. That's the least you can do when your financial means suck. Hopefully, somebody else does a decent crime movie about hurricane Katrina somewhere, because the setting is just exploding with ideas and possibilities. I'll take more in consideration also when a movie is deliberately held back by a studio and has a quick video release like this one. It's usually not good news. STREETS OF BLOOD doesn't really live up to anything, but maybe a nomination to the Razzie Awards.
SCORE: 28%