De Niro. Pacino. It can’t be all bad, right?
Two of cinema’s most iconic figures finally pair up in a film where they have a considerable amount of time together on-screen. Unfortunately, you’ve seen Righteous Kill before, as the substance beyond the film’s headlining marquee treads familiar ground.
Two seasoned veterans of the NYPD are inches short of retirement and light-years into the realm of apathy toward the nature of what they see and do for a living. When they are called to investigate the murder of one of the city’s most notorious pimps, they are drawn into a web of suspicious ties to cases once thought to be solved. The crimes persist and this leads to the realization that they may be hunting a vigilante whose goal is to take down those whom the judicial system failed to.
The story has “rehash” written all over it, but one comes to expect that from crime sagas released in the post-summer theatrical dumping ground of September. Lets be honest though: the interest in seeing Righteous Kill is entirely hinged on the pairing of De Niro and Pacino. While not without some mildly entertaining banter between the two, the film struggles to achieve anything outside of mediocrity despite the presence of its leading men. With scene cuts and cinematography reminiscent of a Steven Seagal straight-to-DVD thriller, director Jon Avnet rarely achieves any real sense of urgency with the characters. This is quite a feat when you have the men behind Michael Corleone and Travis Bickle in virtually every scene of the film. The appeal of these two actors in recent years has certainly always been the fact that despite their age they could still deliver a punch (both literally and figuratively) with their craft, but the film paints a weathered, “I-forgot-to-take-my-vitamins-this-morning” aura.
If you’re a hardcore fan of either De Niro or Pacino, it might be worth catching during a cheap matinee. You’ll be teased by the names on the poster, humbled by the hackneyed direction early on, and finally you’ll settle half-way through the film for an edgeless presence of edgy actors. In the end, however, you’re better off picking up Michael Mann’s 1995 classic crime drama Heat, also featuring Pacino and De Niro in the same film. The difference is that their very limited time together on-screen in that film (as well as the narrative) is ten times more engaging than their two-hour rendezvous in Righteous Kill.
