Would Be Kings begins with a bang—a literal explosion, when a meth lab blows up in an urban neighborhood. From there, the gritty Canadian crime drama (hard to imagine, but yes it’s true) by director David Wellington becomes an efficient police procedural and family drama—a two-hour “Law and Order” without the order.
Out on DVD, Would Be Kings is interesting for depicting a chain of catastrophe forged by a single lapse of ethics. It’s downhill for detective Patrick Lehane (Currie Graham) once he steals money from the trunk of a gunrunner. Deaths follow in the twilight criminal world where, sometimes, a badge is all that separates a crook from a cop. There is much family tension with Patrick’s cousin, Jamie (Ben Bass), a police officer with a spotty record at best. Patrick’s wife (Natasha Henstridge) frets that her husband is married to his job, not her. The standout character, however, is the crime kingpin (Robert Forster), an old school godfather worried about the environment, distrustful of contemporary society, contemptuous of meth addicts and—playing Mephisto to Lehane’s Faust—a man of his word.
