Reviewed by
Christopher Armstead
"Honey, I have to go move your car." Seriously filmmakers who are behind ‘Street Kings 2: Motor City"? You’re playing the ‘I gotta move your car’ card? Alas, it is painfully predictable and trite passages such as this, in this film ‘Street Kings 2: Motor City’ a sequel in name only, that keep it slightly below the Mendoza Line of Entertainment Mediocrity.
Three years ago in the Motor City, a drug bust with some evil racists… as opposed to the benevolent, kind and gentle racists… goes all to hell. There are dead biker racists all over the place and top cop Marty Kingston (Ray Liotta) took three to knee cap at close range.
Fast forward to the here and now where we see Marty dressed up like McGruff the Crime Dog during some school assembly. McGruff has a noticeable limp, which isn’t lost on the children, who ask why. He tells the kids that a bad man stepped on his paw, but no worries because that bad man is living in hell and is now Satan’s Butt-Slave. He didn’t actually say that, but if he did then this would’ve been my favorite movie ever.
Anyway, the previous evening someone killed crazy, dirty, out of control cop Officer Quintana (Scott Norman), and as such hardnosed grizzled police chief Captain Walker (Linda Boston) has assigned fresh faced rookie detective Dan Sullivan (Shawn Hatosy) to fix this messy situation. And much to Sullivan’s dismay he’s been assigned McGruff over here, minus the dog suit but with the limp, to be his partner since he was Quintana’s partner for eight or so years.
So our fresh faced rookie and our scarred veteran are on the prowl, all with the bothersome specter of Internal Affairs looming in the background. Eventually their investigation takes them to a pair of dirty cops in Rogan (Kevin Chapman) and Greene (Clifton Powell). Let me tell you something about actor Clifton Powell. When the order of the day calls for a character who is rotten down to the very core of his foul
soul, there’s not a lot of actors out there who can do this better than Clifton Powell can. Sullivan, being young and stupid, confronts Greene and Rogan, basically calling them dirty cops. Not very bright. It doesn’t matter much because both of these dirty cops will be dead before nightfall. Shout Out to our good friend Julia Ho who played the broken English speaking madam at the massage parlor that Greene got wasted at. Note that Julia speaks English better than Anthony Hopkins and I don’t think we have any Asian Massage parlors in the Detroit City limits. But if I’m wrong, fellow citizens, please correct me with addresses and Mapquest directions as proof.
Who exactly is killing these cops and why? Well… about thirty minutes in they tell us who is killing these cops and why. Kind of had me wondering why we were pretending to make it a mystery in the first place. So since we know who is doing all of this and since our fresh faced cop knows who is doing all of this and since all of the actors in this movie have been in this kind of movie at some stage in their careers and since the overwhelming majority of the audience members over the age of five have seen this movie in some variation… is there any reason to watch it?
Probably not. To the credit of the team behind ‘Street Kings 2: Motor City’, it is competent. I mean it looks good, it sounds decent, and it has these fancy opening credits that reflect off the hood of a muscle car. It’s not like actors such as Ray Liotta or Clifton Powell had to do too much studying before they caught the redeye to Detroit to shoot this thing since both of the characters they play are pretty much their signature characters, and if you happen to be from Detroit you will see lots of cool landmarks and the occasional person you personally know pop up on the screen.
If only director Chris Fisher could’ve done something, anything in this movie that was new or different or fresh which might’ve separated this from any other dirty cop revenge movie that we’ve ever seen. Anything. ‘Street Kings 2’ is so generic, so run-of-the-mill and so tired that it’s difficult to believe that it took a pair of screenwriters to stitch this movie together. What little this movie did have to offer, at least as far as originality was concerned, was rudely discarded way too early. Scott Norman’s crazy cop Quintana was interesting, but he’s gone in act one. As we pointed out, Clifton Powell does rotten about as well as anybody ever, but he was done away with almost as quickly. Ray Liotta as McGruff the Crime Dog? I was hoping that dog suit would show up later on in this movie in some clever inventive way, but alas it was thrown out in favor of exposition that was far less imaginative. Like having to meet at a strip club. Never seen that before.
I was looking for anything, and I mean anything that could’ve make ‘Street Kings 2: Motor City’ worth recommending. That ‘SWAT’ sequel they shot in Detroit wasn’t the second coming of ‘Die Hard’ or anything but it did move fast and was delightfully stupid. ‘Street Kings 2: Motor City’ was un-delightfully predictable, just as stupid and moved half as fast. That’s called disappointment where I come from.
