Pun Salad

Right at the beginning of this movie, we get the feeling that Keanu Reeves is playing a troubled, sensitive soul. He looks at himself despondently in the washroom mirror. He barfs into the toilet. He picks himself up a bunch of those handy airline-size vodka bottles, and starts nipping away behind the wheel.

I'm not often hugely sensitive to subtle personality clues in movies, but somehow I picked up on this right away.

Anyway, Keanu plays police detective Tom Ludlow, who is part of a covert team that administers rough vigilante justice to evildoers. That sort of thing is technically illegal, and in any case never works out well. Pretty soon, his estranged ex-partner winds up dead of extreme lead poisoning, and Tom gets caught up in the investigation.

Good actors Hugh Laurie and Forest Whitaker appear as Keanu's fellow cops. (Laurie keeps his House accent, but not his limp.) There's a lot of violence and the dialog is testosterone-soaked, and it kept me playing along right to the end, even though its who-can-you-trust conspiricism doesn't rise to even semi-plausibility. The guy who wrote this doesn't like cops very much.