2002’s Dark Blue opens in 1992, with a decorated Los Angeles cop named Eldon Perry (Kurt Russell) holed in a hotel room with a shotgun and a pistol.  Perry, who were learn comes from a long line of cops, should be happy. He’s about to finally get promoted.  While Los Angeles is in the grip of the riots that followed the Rodney King verdict, Perry’s lifelong dream is about to come true.  But, instead of celebrating, he’s a nervous wreck.  Dark Blue shows us why.

Perry is the protegee of Commander Jack Van Meter (Brendan Gleeson), a corrupt cop who regularly encourages his men to harass, arrest, and even kill anyone who is suspected of having committed a crime.  Van Meter and Perry claim that they’re doing what they need to do in order to keep the city safe.  They look at a reformer like Assistant Chief Arthur Holland (Ving Rhames) and they see someone who has no idea what it’s actually like on the streets and who is more concerned with his own ambitions than anything else.  However, Van Meter has a side operation going.  Two of his informants (played by Korupt and Dash Mihok) regularly commit robberies that he sets up and helps them get away with.  When their latest robbery leaves four people dead and one wounded, Van Meter assigns Perry and Perry’s young partner, Bobby Keough (Scott Speedman), to the case.  Bobby is young and maybe not as cynical as Perry.  But he’s also Van Meter’s nephew so the assumption is that he’ll play ball.

And, at first, Bobby does go along with whatever Van Meter and Perry say.  When Perry unknowingly gets too close to the truth about what happened at the robbery, Van Meter orders Perry and Bobby to go after someone else.  When Perry orders Bobby to execute an innocent man, Bobby does so and Perry takes the blame.  (In one of the film’s best scenes, Bobby gives his statement about the shooting to Internal Affairs, just for the detectives to shut off the tape recorder and give Bobby a chance to make a better statement.)  But when Bobby has a crisis of conscience and Van Meter reveals that depths that he’ll go to protect himself, Eldon Perry is forced to reconsider the life that he’s built for himself as a cop.  With Los Angeles descending into chaos, Perry has to finally decide whether or not to play the game or to do the right thing.

There’s a lot going on in Dark Blue. Actually, there’s too much going on.  The film is based on a story by James Ellroy and it has Ellroy’s traditionally dense plotting, full of duplicitous characters and macho dialogue.  Not only is Perry dealing with the investigation, he’s also dealing with his frayed marriage to Sally (Lolita Davidovich).  Not only is Bobby struggling with his ethics but he’s also struggling with his love for Sgt. Beth Williamson (Michael Michele), who is also Holland’s assistant and who also once had a one-night stand with Holland, pictures of which have gotten into Van Meter’s hands and which Van Meter plans to use to blackmail Holland into taking a job in Cleveland.  It’s a lot to keep track of and, visually, director Ron Shelton struggles to capture Ellroy’s trademark prose.  As a writer, Ellroy’s jittery style can get readers to accept almost anything, no matter how complex or potentially disturbing.  Ellroy has no fear of alienating the reader.  Shelton, on the other hand, has a much more gentle style and it’s not a good match for Ellroy’s vision of a world gone mad.  The film mixes Ellroy’s moral ambiguity with Shelton’s rather predictable liberal piety and the end result never really comes together.  Shelton doesn’t seem to be sure what he wants to say with Dark Blue.

That said, this film does feature an excellent performance from Kurt Russell.  Russell plays a character who is both good and bad.  Perry cares about his partner.  He cares about his family.  He’s loyal to the police department.  His methods may be extreme but he’s also taking criminals off the street.  But Perry is also thoroughly mired in Van Meter’s corruption.  Perry trusts Van Meter because Perry considers the police force to be his family.  His shock at being betrayed is one of the more poignant things about the film and Russell captures the moment perfectly.

Dark Blue has a lot that it wants to say, about morality, policing, and race relations.  It doesn’t really work because Ron Shelton was the wrong director to bring James Ellroy’s pulp sensibility to life.  But it does provide Kurt Russell a chance to show us that he’s one of our most underrated actors.