Oh, Keanu Reeves, must you continue playing cops? I’d rather you did more Shakespeare, in which you’re actually more believable. But no, after Point Break (I consider FBI agents to be cops) and Speed, you have to go and do Street Kings and try to make us accept you as one of the hardest vice detectives to ever grace the big screen. Want a cookie? Or an Oscar? Even if you do pull off the equivalent of what Ethan Hawke did in Training Day, you’re not going to get the notice of the Academy. The only thing keeping you from being the least likely actor to be taken seriously as a tough undercover officer is the existence of Paul Walker, whose performance in The Fast and the Furious makes you look like Dirty Harry.

Speaking of Training Day and The Fast and the Furious, the screenwriter behind those two movies, David Ayer, is the director of Street Kings. Fortunately, he didn’t write this one. The guys who did write it are L.A. Confidential novelist James Ellroy, who also came up with the original story, Equilibrium writer-director Kurt Wimmer and an apparent newcomer named Jamie Moss. Co-starring in the film, some of whom are sure to make Reeves’ acting appear even worse, are Forest Whitaker, Hugh Laurie, Chris Evans (if you saw Sunshine, you know he’s actually a pretty good actor), Common, Jay Mohr, John Corbett, Cedric the Entertainer, The Game and Naomie Harris. OK, enough ragging on Reeves. But despite the appealing names of Ellroy and Whitaker, this still looks like a generic cops-and-gangstas movie. I’d rather just wait for Keanu as Klaatu later this year.

Street Kings hits theaters April 11.

The Guardian published a long, bizarre story yesterday on Dennis Hopper. The story seems to have been spun out of a brief meeting over chocolate cake at the Serpentine Gallery in London (which, as author Stuart Jeffries puts it, “has managed to seduce Hollywood’s most enduring screen psychopath to greet guests to its [annual] fundraising party”), and is thus suitably heavy with Hopper’s musings on art. But there’s one very strange paragraph right in the middle, in which the actor/filmmaker/photographer/Ameriprise shill responds to a question about his involvement in a heretofore-unannounced franchise film:

[Hopper] certainly isn’t in the mood to discuss any of the half a dozen films he is due to appear in this year, a roster which is due to include a performance in Speed 3, even though I have plenty of questions about that. Surely his character Howard Payne died in a decapitation incident in the last reel of Speed 1? “It’s a river of shit,” he tells me pleasantly but firmly, “from which I have tried to extract some gold.”

I’m sure no one would be surprised to hear that Hopper (who long-ago abandoned any allegiance to hippie ideology and now considers himself a Republican) would take a role sheerly for the “gold.” I also wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the geniuses who brought us Speed had come up with a way to bring Howard Payne back from the dead. What is a little surprising, is that this topic would come up casually in an interview, considering that there’s really been no legitimate indication that Speed 3 is actually being made.

For starters, it’s *not* one of the half-dozen films on Hopper’s slate, as per his IMDb profile–in fact, there’s no IMDB entry for Speed 3 whatsoever. There’s been no item about a third Speed movie on any reputable blog or in either of the major Hollywood trades. The *only* source I can find that backs up the idea of a third Speed is an unattributed item tacked onto the end of Hopper’s Wikipedia profile, which reads:

Jan DeBont, director of Speed and Speed 2: Cruise Control, has enforced Hopper’s contractual obligation to star in the third and final installment of the trilogy Speed 3: Highway to Hell, ressurecting [sic] the legendary character Howard Payne. Shooting begins this October. Speed 3: Highway to Hell is set to release in the summer of 2009.

So tell me if I have this right: a Guardian reporter went into an interview with Dennis Hopper, quoted a mysterious unsourced (and poorly spelled) Wikipedia entry, got a “no comment”, and then ran the no-comment it as if it confirmed the Wikipedia non-story? Is that even legal?