Dark Blue (2003)

In Dark Blue, Kurt Russell is bristlingly intense as a power-abusing LAPD detective who doesn't much care who he shoots as long as they're felons. He falls somewhere between Dirty Harry and downright evil, and that gray area gives him a compelling complexity -- that's largely wasted in a film that paints its portrait of corruption in simplistic strokes. Set in 1992, it uses the Rodney King verdict as a climactic backdrop. Yet against such disturbing real-life images, the melodrama in the foreground seems even less convincing. EXTRAS Three making-of docs might have seemed more substantial as one; director Ron Shelton's commentary will interest only those who REALLY liked the movie.