Ray Liotta is Compelling as Always, but the Otherwise Over-Achieving Street Kings 2: Motor City Is Let Down By a Wooden Screenplay
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Before he was the monster who unleashed first Suicide Squad and then Bright on an unsuspecting world, David Ayer was a respected screenwriter with a unique gift for writing gritty, morally ambiguous crime dramas about cops and criminals living on the edge in Los Angeles.
Ayer helped plant seeds that would eventually yield billions in box-office revenue when he co-wrote the screenplay for 2001’s The Fast and the Furious. It was a film that, like so many films before and after it, explored the blurry intersection of law enforcement and criminality and the overlapping, inextricably intertwined nature of good and evil.
A slew of similar screenplays followed suit, most notably 2001’s Training Day, which won an Academy Award for star Denzel Washington, but also Ron Shelton’s Dark Blue, 2005’s Harsh Times, which marked his directorial debut, 2008’s Street Kings and 2012’s End of the Watch.
Then Ayer made Suicide Squad and everyone instantly lost respect for him and all of his previous films. Denzel Washington was forced to give back the Academy Award he won for Training Day.
But before his spectacular fall from grace Ayer was the white man to see if you wanted someone to write a “gritty”, “dark” thriller about corrupt cops and non-white criminals in the City of Angels.
This was a world Ray Liotta was uniquely qualified to inhabit so even though Ayer didn’t have anything to do with 2011’s Street Kings 2: Motor City it nevertheless inhabits the shadowy criminal universe Ayer created in his screenplays.
Liotta is the marquee attraction in Street Kings II: Motor City but it disappointingly reveals itself to be something infinitely less appealing than a Ray Liotta vehicle: a Shawn Hatosy movie.
Everyone hates Shawn Hatosy. When Liotta died there was an outpouring of grief and respect. When Hatosy finally dies people will start lining up to urinate on his grave.
More like Shawn NOT-so-Hatosy! That dude sucks
Everywhere Hatosy goes, people punch him hard, in the face, and yell, “Good job fucking up Outside Providence, loser! Outside Providence-ruining-ass-motherfucker.”
I was moved to watch Street Kings 2: Motor City in part by a random comment I made in the Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans episode of Travolta/Cage about how if Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans were an exploitative direct-to-video cheapie it would probably star Ray Liotta.
I did not mean that as a dig, just that Cage and Liotta share a genius for pummeling intensity but Cage has always been the bigger star.
Street Kings 2: Motor City is the closest Liotta got to making that fabled direct-to-video Bad Lieutenant sequel. It finds him playing a corrupt cop who, like Nicolas Cage’s Bad Lieutenant in Port of Call New Orleans, is injured in the line of duty in the opening sequence.
Liotta’s veteran narcotics division officer Marty Kingston is shot early in Street Kings 2: Motor City and consequently spends the rest of the film with a noticeable limp. It’s a smart move thematically that lends the character an unmistakable vulnerability.
Marty is getting old. He is in pain. He’s been a cop forever and doesn’t seem to have much to show for it beyond a lot of scars of the literal and figurative variety.
He is, in other words, exhausted on an existential as well as a physical level. To put things in Lethal Weapon terms, he’s getting too old for this shit.
When we see him next, the depressed lawman is in a mangy dog suit playing an off-brand MacGruff-style crime fighter for the amusement of children. For the sake of Liotta’s dignity, I sincerely hope that it was some underpaid extra in the dog suit but Liotta was a true artist committed to his craft so I would not be at all surprised if he donned that ratty canine costume for the sake of art.
Marty doesn’t seem particularly concerned with finding the man who killed his partner. He seems over the whole “cop” thing whereas his hotshot new partner Detective Dan Sullivan (Hatosy) burns with ambition and idealism.
Street Kings 2: Motor City resembles Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans in making inspired use of a quintessentially American city with a rich history that now feels haunted, decaying and lost. Also, New Orleans and Detroit offer EXCELLENT tax incentives to make shooting there even more appealing to direct-to-video movies starring Nicolas Cage, Bruce Willis and/or Frank Grillo.
The moderately over-achieving sequel sounds fantastic thanks to a soundtrack full of atmospheric old soul songs that I will individually and collectively call Will Smith because they all slap and a terrific score by up and coming composer Jonathan Sadoff (In the interest of full disclosure, I dated Sadoff’s cousin for several years).
Street Kings 2: Motor City looks fantastic as well. It was shot by the marvelously named Marvin V. Rush, who hasn’t worked much in film but has shot hundreds of episodes of various Star Trek incarnations and lends the proceedings a texture at once lush and gritty, urban and dream-like.
Liotta is terrific, if unexpectedly understated as a dirty cop living a double life but the script lets everyone down. It’s the kind of insultingly primitive screenplay that artfully and realistically conveys conveys that Dan thinks his new partner’s old partner Santino may have been dirty by having him write on a piece of paper “Santino = dirty?”
Liotta’s tired shamus doesn’t make much of an effort to hide his corruption. He stops just short of sending his more energetic younger partner an invite to join a Facebook group he runs for dirty Detroit cops who steal drug money and kill witnesses
Street Kings 2: Motor City is visually sophisticated and has production values more in line with cinematic fare than direct-to-video cheapies but thematically and plot-wise it lives down to its status as a follow-up to a movie that wasn’t particularly good in the first place.
As he often did, Liotta plays a bad guy who is more sympathetic and compelling than the hero. It’s a real performance with complexity, depth and nuance that can’t quite make Street Kings 2: Motor City feel like a real movie, and not just over-achieving RedBox product.
Pre-order The Fractured Mirror, the Happy Place’s next book, a 600 page magnum opus about American films about American films, illustrated by the great Felipe Sobreiro over at Make it happen over at https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s first non-"Weird Al” Yankovic-themed book is out! And it’s only 16.50, shipping, handling and taxes included, 30 bucks for two books, domestic only!
Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here and The Weird Accordion to Al here
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace We just added a bunch of new tiers and merchandise AND a second daily blog just for patrons!
Alternately you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al, signed, for just 19.50, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here.
I make my living exclusively through book sales and Patreon so please support independent media and one man’s dream and kick in a shekel or two!