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Killer Movie
Robert De Niro and Al Pacino star as cops on the trail of a vigilante serial killer in this throwback to the straight-to-video thrillers of the 1980s
Righteous Kill sounds like one of those titles that studio bosses keep in a filing cabinet until the right script comes along to attach it to. The story of veteran detectives Turk (De Niro) and Rooster (Pacino) on the trail of a serial killer we are lead to believe is De Niro, Righteous Kill is a low-rent genre flick that looks and plays like a straight-to-video botch-job and can only have been unjustly promoted to the cinema on the supposed event of Pacino and De Niro uniting on screen for only the second time. The film is dead before the titles have finished: a cliched montage of Pacino and De Niro on the shooting range intercut with tumbling spent cartridges and character scenes of Pacino playing speed chess and De Niro at the baseball diamond. De Niro's detective delivers a confession on security footage. He has killed 14 people. He cleans the scum off the streets just like he yearned to do in Taxi Driver. A vigilante killer is bumping off known felons. Is De Niro that killer or as this film is from the writer of Inside Man, which had a final reel twist, will there also be a cunning kink to Righteous Kill? Yes there will. And you will spot it early. You will spot it because, even though De Niro's detective has confessed to the killings right up front, we never see him actually pull the trigger. Righteous Kill commits such a cheesy cheat of withholding information from the audience that it barely deserves to go into the world spoiler free. De Niro and Pacino's first appearance together since their cursory hook up in Michael Mann's Heat would generate more excitement if these legends were doing anything other than going through the motions. Pacino in particular crosses the line between acting and just reading his lines out loud. To be fair, some of those lines are so dreadful that they could not bear much weight. De Niro's Turk is servicing the sexual kinks of CSI officer Karen Corelli (Gugino) who goes in for rough sex. "She's got my sperm levels so low I've got to sit down to take a piss," he observes, to general bemusement. Morally, Righteous Kill comes out squarely in favour of the vigilante approach, bumping off rapists and child killers who escape justice without exploring any of the reasons why this might be a bad idea. Scenes come and go in clouds of confusion, flashbacks and cutaways leaping in and out of the action like misbehaving children, but a moral stink persists. That stench becomes unbearable after the rape of Corelli's character, a needless act put in to push one of our heroes further over to the side of villain, and especially nasty as she earlier willingly participated in a bit of sex game mock rape with De Niro's Turk. With a 100 years of active service between them, Pacino and De Niro's detectives are the pundits on 'Grumpy Old Men' with firearms - they don't just grouch about injustice in the world, they exact retribution and at no point are their activities morally questioned. Given the shoddy manner in which the film is put together, maybe the conscience hit the cutting room floor too. Verdict Nasty and incompetent. |
