When we first see him, Detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) is a lone, drunken wreck. He wakes up, vomits, cleans up, and grabs some liquor on the way to work. ‘Work’ turns out to be a straight drug deal: Ludlow taunts his buyers into assaulting him and stealing his car, then tracks the GPS locator on his car to find their hideout. He takes them out, recovers the drugs and a couple kidnapped schoolgirls, and becomes a hero. His CO Captain Wander (Forest Whitaker, loud and brash) and his fellow detectives congratulate him, pleased as punch. Another headline-grabbing caper for the LAPD. Ludlow’s old partner Washington (Terry Crews), still wearing blue, is less than impressed and smells something dirty on him.

But already there are story problems. Street Kings is partially written and based on a story by James Ellroy, and if you know Ellroy’s prose work, you can map out the movie’s remaining 105 minutes just by seeing what happens in the first 15. There are some twists and surprises, a few corruption-in-blue genre conventions turned on their ear, but for the most part the landscape will be clear to you. In a way, it’s amusing that a novelist known for complex plotting and multi-layered character connections turns out movies with such clearly delineated lines of morality: Who’s corrupt, who’s clean, and where the money trail leads you, laid out in a few embarrassingly conspicuous dialogue exchanges. In James Ellroy’s Los Angeles, the cops aren’t peacekeepers. They’re just criminals working the best angle in town.

So Ludlow is a cop teetering on the edge of complete moral breakdown, and his detective buddies can’t figure out why he’s angsting so bad about it. Worse, Washington may be ratting on him to Internal Affairs—right up until Washington is killed in a gangland hit in a convenience store, in Ludlow’s presence. That Washington was explicitly targeted by these “robbers” seems obvious from the beginning—they charge in, gun him down, and charge out again—that it’s a wonder that a few of the characters take so long to figure that out. Then again, maybe they haven’t read as many Ellroy books as I have; you pick up that intense violence is a cover or diversion from something else. Either that or it’s a revenge thing.

The captain urges silence on Ludlow’s part, and reworks the story: Ludlow was not present for the hit, but was instead first on scene. He then shuffles Ludlow off to the complaints department, which seems like an odd move, as this puts him directly under Captain Briggs (Hugh Laurie, who looks pretty odd clean-shaven), who’s looking for any angle to take down Wander and his whole cabal. Ludlow hooks up with rookie Detective Diskant (Chris Evans) and decides he’s going to figure out who killed Washington, and why. But you already know the answer to that, don’t you?

It’s not that Street Kings isn’t competently produced and executed, because it is. Look at that cast: Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker, Terry Crews, Naomie Harris, Hugh Laurie, Chris Evans, Common, even a surprising turn by Cedric the Entertainer. Maybe not the first group of people I’d run to if I’m filming my gritty modern-day LA cop story, but they’re all sharp actors turning in good performances. The only stumbles, really, come from the clumsy writing. And the clumsy writing stems from—well, clumsy writing, for one thing, but more from the shifting (non?) morality Street Kings has at its core.

Ludlow leaves the first crime scene and Washington confronts him. You forgot about due process, says Washington. What about the victims’ families? “Suspects,” says Ludlow. “They’re suspects.” Okay, so something about due process and if it still works in the morally grey world of the cops. Ah, but then Washington bites it and there’s a lot of pressure on Ludlow to keep his trap shut so Wander’s unit stays intact. Loyalty trumps integrity, or maybe in their world loyalty is integrity. Insert Bush administration metaphor here.

Ludlow wants his revenge on Washington’s killers, but then there’s Washington’s widow Linda (Harris) telling him not to do it in her name. “Blood doesn’t wash away blood.” So we’re on to the spiral of violence. But later Ludlow saves Linda from death by a conspirator, and she smiles at him when it comes time for him to leave and set things “straight,” as this constantly shifting world defines it. What is “straight”? Revenge by murder? Revenge by exposure? I think the only lesson Street Kings may have at its core is that there is no “straight.”

In my younger years that would have been enough. But what used to feel like a dark revelation now only comes off as an exercise in setting the odds against corrupt characters and watching them crumble. The closing minutes reveal that there is a wheels-within-wheels logic to the goings-on, as in most Ellroy works, but there’s no greater comprehension or catharsis brought on by this knowledge. It’s just another twist and, as it turns out, the final one. There could be a great movie hidden somewhere in Street Kings, but they haven’t found it.