Streets of Blood is set in lawless post-Katrina New Orleans. It stars former A- or B+ listers Sharon Stone and Val Kilmer, plus
screen newcomer 50-Cent.
Feds are
investigating crooked cops. Cops are investigating crooked feds. The
streets are out of control. Blah, blah. Everyone is on the take except one
cop. Usual stuff, but set in a flooded city, with some real footage of the
flood aftermath.
Val Kilmer has been in the straight-to-vid business for some time now,
and I can see why he might have liked this project, because his role is
colorful and the character is on screen for almost the entire film. He
probably has a big enough ego to crave that kind of part, and such
opportunities are no longer being offered to him in big-time movies.
On the other hand, while Sharon Stone has been involved in projects
which bypassed the theaters, I can't imagine why she was involved in this
particular one. The only possible explanation I can think of is that Stone
may have been able to shoot all of her scenes in a single day, which would
have made it easy money.
- Surely there was not a big paycheck.
- Shooting in New Orleans can't be that much of a dream assignment
these days.
- Unlike Kilmer's juicy part, Stone's role seemed like a tack-on, and
all of her scenes could be cut without affecting the film at all. She
played a police psychiatrist and, in effect, her scenes seemed to exist
purely to provide exposition and scene transitions. We see her either
sitting at her desk or at a restaurant while she asks the police
officers some questions about what we have just watched. Her interviews
with the cops almost seem to have been inserted after the fact to make
the plot more comprehensible, as a substitute for the timeworn trick of
adding voice-over narration.
- Stone is too smart to have have read this script and thought "I just
have to be part of this film." There are only two things I liked about
this film other than the sight of the closing credits. First, Kilmer
does an excellent job, as usual. Second, the beginning of the film is
gripping. The opening credit sequence consists of some very impressive
and evocative footage of New Orleans taken immediately after Katrina,
This was followed by a boldly visual and dramatic set piece which takes
place in that city's desperate clean-up phase, with part of the action
taking place within a storage facility for carnival equipment, and the
rest of it in the flooded streets, where a tense "Mexican stand-off"
develops between police and a paranoid private security guard who is
trying to prevent looting. Unfortunately, the worthwhile elements of the
movie are finished about six minutes in, at which point the story jumps
forward six months and turns into a routine police procedural.
