I lived this. The Rodney King beating and the riots because of the LAPD officers were found innocent was current news for a 14-year-old me. Now, I'm not saying I was living it in the sense that I was in the middle of the riots, but I definitely watched it on the news while it was happening. It was a strange time. I fully support the police, I know several officers as well as sheriff's deputies. Some are very close to me. But I also believe this was police brutality. 99.9% of police are good people. But there is that .1% that aren't. And they need to not be cops. But I digress. As far as a police drama featuring corruption amongst their ranks, Dark Blue is cookie cutter. That's something I don't mind, especially since I like these types of cookies. However, what makes me rate this flick the way I did is because of my familiarity of the real life events that are its setting, and Kurt Russell. I love Kurt Russell and this is a fantastic performance by him. Vintage Russell. He's not a bad guy but he does bad things. It's a redemption story. And Kurt has my support if redemption is what his character is looking for.

a good film noir between L.A. Confidential and Copland with a solid storyline and a quality casting

DARK BLUE has a good cast and is a good story, but poorly developed and poorly told. C'est la vie...

An enjoyable corrupt cop movie that takes place near the time of the riots of 92 for Rodney King.

Deeply unpleasant with no one to pull for.

long-winding boring police cowabunga

It's not a film that I'd seen creeping up in lists of ‘best cop films', and it's one I knew very little about but Dark Blue is a sharp and interesting tale of police corruption, set in Los Angeles and taking place across the four days leading up to the acquittal of the four white police officers accused of beating Rodney King. To have the court case as a backdrop works really well, it gives you the extra feeling of injustice while we're seeing everyday police corruption play out in the spine of the plot. Kurt Russell is terrific as a cop who is assigned with his partner to a quadruple homicide, and we immediately see Russell's Elden teaching his young partner Bobby the ways of corruption and intimidation. When they believe they've cracked the case they're told in no uncertain terms by their superior (Brendan Gleeson) to scrap that route of investigation right away, and focus on two particular individuals who aren't guilty of the crime. So corruption is rife, and Eldon is happy to do his superiors dirty work for them. Elden's a good cop; but only in the sense that he's willing to plant evidence on (not entirely) innocent people and turn a blind eye towards the corrupted system. Ving Rhames is a cop who loses his marriage to the job (and infidelity), pushed to the limit by a system that won't allow him to go after the right criminals, and his dislike of Eldon and his superiors force him to make the decision to do everything in his power to bring the corrupt cops to justice. Slowly Eldon begins to realise that he's a pawn to those above him, and that he does have a breaking point. Dark Blue is about many things, but Eldon's character arc is an effective one; by the time he accepts and fully understands his wrong doing there's no hope of redemption, only the option to do the right thing and perhaps put right some of the wrongs he's dished out. Dark Blue is prevalent in todays society, enormously so. It's a film that despite being almost twenty years old is still extremely relevant, and although it's not a masterpiece it really makes you think. It's hard-hitting ending, Eldon's final plight is followed amidst the break out of the L.A riots and is terrifying, wonderfully shot and splicing the chaos of Eldon's charge with the chaos of a city about to explode.

Basically your average corrupt police story full of unlikeable characters. The plot was predictable, formulaic, and confused, the main characters were hateable idiots, all of the characters lacked depth, the pacing was uneven, there wasn't much action overall, Bobby's change of heart didn't make much sense, and nothing was believable. The acting was acceptable but over the top at times, and the cinematography, visual effects, and soundtrack were all nothing noteworthy. Mediocre at best all around.

Los Angeles, 1992. LAPD Sergeant Eldon Perry (Kurt Russell), is pacing in a motel room with a shotgun and pistol. Five days earlier, four people are killed and one wounded when two men, Darryl Orchard and Gary Sidwell, rob a convenience store in order to gain access to a safe in the office. Meanwhile, Perry defends his partner, Detective Bobby Keough (Scott Speedman), before an internal hearing concerning Keough's use of deadly force in a previous case; Keough is later exonerated. Perry and Keough later celebrate the former's impending promotion with their superior, Commander Jack Van Meter (Brendan Gleeson), who is also Keough's uncle. Van Meter, a corrupt cop who often encourages his subordinates to fabricate evidence, visits Orchard and Sidwell's house later that night and takes the money stolen from the safe, admonishing them for behaving recklessly during the robbery. Van Meter assigns Perry and Keough to investigate the robbery, providing a false alibi for Orchard and Sidwell and telling them to pin the crime on someone else. Meanwhile, Assistant Chief Arthur Holland (Ving Rhames) finds Perry's testimony at Keough's hearing suspicious, doubting that Keough killed the suspect as he was charged. His assistant, Beth Williamson (Michael Michele), pulls files on the two men and that a man she has had anonymous casual sex with is Keough... William Arnold of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer gave the film a positive review. "Ron Shelton's Dark Blue is another harrowingly cynical dirty-cop movie in the recent tradition of Training Day and Narc. Yet it's so much more complex, engrossing and satisfying than those films that the comparison is not entirely fair...." However, the film received a negative review from the L.A. Weekly, "Dark Blue is stuffed to the gills with blithely improbable coincidence and subsidiary story line... Shelton is a likable, generous director who's made two pretty good films (Blaze and Bull Durham), but it's not at all clear he has the chops to take on an action movie, let alone the intricacies of police politics — let alone the politics of race, about which he had more imaginative things to say in White Men Can't Jump." Ron Shelton´s "Dark Blue" based on the story by James Ellroy and a script written by David Ayer, is a not that exciting copdrama despite that the 1992 L.A. riots is the backdrop. The main storyline is corrupt cops and their evil doing, something we have seen before many times. Maybe a bit too many times. We get a pretty ok cast in general, but not balaced to my mind. Kurt Russell and Brendan Gleeson are solid, while Ving Rhames and Scott Speedman doesn´t really fit their roles. Trivia: The script was originally set in the midst of the 1960s Watts Riots. James Ellroy updated the original story in 1992 after the request of Producer Caldecot Chubb for budgetary reasons, but asked that his name not be used to promote the movie after he had seen it. David Ayer entirely re-wrote his script and only conserved the names of some characters.

Highly underrated film and I think one of Kurt Russell's best performances.

My original viewing of this, back in 2003, left me pretty sour against the film. I think my issue then was I just wasn't prepared for such a system shock, in seeing Kurt Russell be such a bastard. That was a pretty unfair assessment. While the plot is a little cliche, as far as corrupt cop stories go, it's still a well done piece with an excellent, richly layered performance from Russell. Against a tense, ticking-time-bomb of a backdrop.

A sad tale of police corruption. An OK thriller. (First and only viewing - 3/26/2020)

Definitely worth a few viewings - Pretty intense climax and a bit of a surprise ending. Plus Kurt Russell and Ving Rhames? Can't beat that! Rounded up to 4 Stars but I'd probably give it 3.75.

The 10 min LA riot scene is cool, besides that it's just a bad crime drama. No real hero. Every character is unlikable.

Kurt Russell plays a compromised cop in the middle of a cover up in the days leading up to the Rodney King decision and the ensuing riots, and while it's a fairly gritty tale and believable enough, I just never fully committed to it because I can't get behind Scott Speedman and his boyish face, for whatever reason. Worth a rental, but I doubt it's going to be anything you wanna watch more than once.

Routine cop movie, but Russell keeps it alive with an honest performance. Great supportive cast too. I'm surprised a director like Shelton, known for sports comedies, would do a cop flick.

I've never seen a movie that is so... "okay". How's the acting, it's okay. How's the plot, it's okay. How's the action, when it happens, it's okay. What makes this film watchable is Kurt Russell. I really like him as an actor but in this, he is acting more like Nicolas Cage with out-of-nowhere over-the-top freak-outs. "Dark Blue" was written by one of my favourite screenwriters, David Ayer. His movies, whether writing or directing, always get me invested extremely quick such as "Training Day", "The Fast and the Furious", "End of Watch" etc. But "Dark Blue" didn't have anything special in it to hook me in right away. It took a good 45 minutes for this movie to get just the slightest bit interesting. Roger Ebert gave it two thumbs up but I'm gonna have to give a thumbs down to this one. There are better cop movies out there.

Kurt Russell's performance alone is the main reasoned I reviewed this movie. The movie is not great but is made considerably better with Russell involved. He is the reason my rating is 4 stars instead of 3.

Oh wow, this was so '90s.

An average flick if I've ever seen one. Some scenes work, others not so much. Russell is quite good as a corrupt officer but everything else about this film screams generic. A shame really since the film makers clearly have a higher intent in mind and the Rodney King era is ripe for a quality cinematic treatment.