This just in: Cops take care of their own.

That's the earth-shattering discovery in "Street Kings," a police procedural starring Keanu Reeves and Forest Whitaker that seems to believe it has discovered what is one of the subgenre's most enduring premises.

What the filmmakers, including co-screenwriter James Ellroy ("L.A. Confidential"), fail to understand is that the conceit should be a starting point for deeper explorations and nuances about character, not the punch line to its own mystery. That we know what's going to happen from the start does not portend great things.

All the movie's treacheries, deceptions and story twists are marred by our lack of innocence. We see the big picture way before the characters do, and that pushes us right out of the movie and back into our seats -- the last place we want to be. And the movie's moral relativity (that the dividing line between good cop and bad cop is a matter of inches) seems like a flimsy pretext for hard-core shock value: nasty violence, colorful cussing and multi-bullet executions.

The big-name casting brings no honor, or even fun, to the hackneyed roles. Whitaker treats his cliched cop commander as if he were a gravitas-laden Iago. Reeves's too-cool-to-emote approach keeps us eternally distanced. Cedric the Entertainer adds no special chuckles to his cop informer. And as a Machiavellian internal affairs officer, Hugh Laurie phones in the jaded, wiser-than-thou mannerisms of Dr. Gregory House, his character in TV's popular "House."

-- Desson Thomson (April 11, 2008)

Contains violence and profanity.