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Visual:		5.0
Audio:		6.0
Acting:		7.0
Writing:		5.0
Score:		4.0

Director(s):	Jon Avnet
Writer(s):	Russell Gewirtz
Starring:	Brian Dennehy • Carla Gugino • Donnie Wahlberg • John Leguizamo • Robert De Niro • Al Pacino • Curtis Jackson • Trilby Glover
Genre:	Drama • Thriller
Website:	http://www.righteouskill-themovie.com
Release Date:	September 12, 2008
Rated:

The anticipation of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro’s proper collaboration had reached such heights—only teased in The Godfather: Part II and Heat—that even an epic by Scorsese, Coppola or Lumet would face a problematic expectation; let alone some uneventful cop thriller that looks like the kind of thing you watch on HBO on a sick bedridden day because for some reason there are no Law & Order reruns on.

Righteous Kill is a movie with a twist that almost wants to be guessed early. It’s not that the story is overly transparent—in fact, the scene setups and dialogue try to be relatively subtle—but director Jon Avnet could not have telegraphed the twist more. De Niro plays Turk, a brutal cop with an anger problem. The film opens with his videotape confession of the murders he’d committed. Throughout the film, Turk narrates his whole experience as a killer cop and several times in the presence of other cops, he acts like a guilty man trying to deny his crime. Of course, when a film tries this hard to tell you that someone’s the killer, but the killer’s identity is ominously hidden by POV shots and truncated dialogue (“It’s you! Detective…”) during the killing scenes, how can you not expect a big twist coming? The big fault of the film is that it doesn’t provide any other suspect other than the obvious, and then enunciate clues throughout the film to point him out.

The murder mystery itself is never that engaging to begin with. Presumably because Russell Gewirtz wrote it as a dark character-based cop story but Avnet shot it as a procedural, even though it barely has any material that covers the investigation. Funny how even though you could see it coming from a mile away, the twist still feels contrived and contradictory when it appears, saved only by the rudimentary insertion of a shrink character spouting psychobabble about how the killer really wants to be caught.

Most disappointing of all is perhaps the lack of chemistry between the two giants. Michael Mann might’ve frustrated many people when he made Heat and only pitted De Niro and Pacino against each other in one scene, but maybe he was onto something when he kept them separated. It’s sad how, instead of stretching their talents to see how these two greats compliment each other in achieving a peak together, Avnet is content with typecasting. De Niro is the loose cannon angry pitbull while Pacino is the cool charismatic customer with all the attention-grabbing monologues and one-liners. This is the same weak shit roles these two have been cruising on in their twilight years. As tempered veterans, they both slide into their roles effortlessly, which is partly at fault for how boring their characters are. Because of this, it’s difficult to buy this supposed thirty-some years friendship that their characters share. Both DeNiro and Pacino pull the awareness towards themselves and not into gelling a partnership.

It’s hard to say that Righteous Kill isn’t worth watching, despite it being a really terrible movie. Obviously, whatever the case—or movie—might be, it’s still freakin’ De Niro and Pacino riffing off of each other for the entire duration of the film. This is the kind of throwaway cop thriller that wouldn’t be worth a glance if it didn’t have star power. Regrettably, this one somehow secured itself two overqualified actors. Then again, this is a movie that has fanservice as its main sell.