4.15.2008

racist cop keanu in street kings

The movie Street Kings, starring Keanu Reeves, opened in theaters over the weekend. Though I haven't been following it very closely, this movie has been on my radar for a little while now... Formerly titled Kings X, or The Night Watchmen, the movie first popped up around here last year when we heard there were some racist Asian elements in the film. Now the movie's out, and this review gives an example of what's wrong with Street Kings:
Night: Koreatown. Tom Ludlow (Reeves) stops by a liquor store and gulps down a couple teeny airline bottles of vodka. He insults some Korean hoods, who want to buy a machinegun he's got stashed in his trunk, insinuating that they're Japanese. "You dress white, talk black and drive Jew," he tells them before throwing in an all-purpose anti-Asian slur.

Ludlow is a racist cop, a renegade cop, a vigilante cop. We know this because next he wantonly massacres a bunch of Korean bad guys and makes it look like they shot one another. Then, when he's confronted by his African-American ex-partner, Terrence Washington (Terry Crews), he yells, "I'm racist!" In response, Washington calls him a "white boy." This seems especially odd because the Chinese-Hawaiian-Caucasian Reeves is, ancestrally speaking, roughly as white as Barack Obama.
All this, I suppose, is to show that Keanu is a badass, don't-give-a-F cop on the edge blah blah blah. Ooooh. Of course, ultimately, we're supposed to root for him... so the fact that he exhibits all this racist behavior towards Asians during the course of the movie, that's negligible, right? Because, dude, in the end they're just bunch of nameless, faceless Asians. And nobody cares about them. Just another day in Hollywood!

angry archive