Righteous Kill

If there's one thing I hate, it's movies that think they're smarter than their audience. Righteous Kill opens with a character giving a video confession to a series of murders. The film then flashes back, explaining the events leading up to those murders, and a pair of detectives who try to solve it. So, the movie is a mystery. If this is true, logic automatically points to the fact that the guy we saw giving the confession in the opening scene (and various times throughout the film) is not the real killer, and the movie is playing with us. After all, why would a mystery give itself away in the very first scene? We know this, but the movie thinks it's just too smart for us, and we're constantly one step behind it.

The detectives in question are a pair of life-long partners and friends named Turk (Robert De Niro) and Rooster (Al Pacino). I smiled when I first heard their names, as those are the kind of names cops only have in the movies. They talk the way cops only talk in the movies, too. They're constantly throwing zippy and overly scripted one liners back and forth to each other, and discussing pop culture references like Underdog in their dialogue while they're in the middle of a sting operation. De Niro and Pacino are obviously legendary actors, and the film's ad campaign seems to be built solely around their pairing. These are not legendary characters they're playing here, or even good characters. They're stock tough talking cliches inhabiting a poorly developed story. It's almost as if the filmmakers cast the lead roles, gave themselves a pat on the back, and thought their presence alone would help the script. The screenplay by Russell Gerwitz (Inside Man) didn't need the right stars, it needed another couple drafts before going in front of the cameras.

The plot concerns a series of murders involving various criminals, drug dealers, and rapists who have all managed to escape or dodge the law in one way or another, and start winding up dead. Turk and Rooster are assigned the case, and almost find themselves sympathetic to this vigilante who is taking the law into their own hands. As the bodies pile up, another pair of detectives (played by John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg) start to get suspicious of the friends. The victims seem to be criminals that Turk and Rooster have dealt with in the past, and so they start to get curious. Director John Avnet (who directed Pacino's last bomb from earlier this year, 88 Minutes) tries his hardest to hide the identity of the killer, which is another tip off that it's not who it's trying to lead us to think it is. It's almost comical the lengths the movie goes to hide what we already know. When we see one of the victims come face to face with the off screen killer, their dialogue suddenly turns awkward and stilted, instead of simply saying who they're looking at.

The thing is, anyone who is half awake within the first 10 minutes of the movie or so will constantly be ahead of these characters. Righteous Kill tries to throw some worthless red herrings at us, like a drug dealer named Spider (rapper Curtis Jackson), who winds up having very little of anything to do with the film itself. He's simply there to throw us off, not really doing a good job while he's at it. The main reason being that this is a sparsely populated film. Because there are so few characters that the movie focuses on, and we can already cancel out the one it's trying to trick us into thinking is the killer, it's not that hard to put the pieces together long before the characters do. When the big revelation does finally come, it gives both De Niro and Pacino a chance to do some of the biggest ham acting of their individual careers. This movie goes from either stagnant and dull, to convoluted and over the top. There's no room for in-between here.

Unfortunately, the screenplay is not the only problem that can be found here. This is a movie where no one seemed to know what they were supposed to be doing. De Niro and Pacino look tired and worn here, like they're trying to look like they're engaged by this material, but they just can't bring up the energy. Given the fact that their teaming is this film's big selling point, it's a disappointment. The other performances don't hold up much better, as no one is given anything to do, and they simply stand around, withing they were in a better movie with these legendary actors. What's worse, the movie seems to be edited in such a way that no one really cared. Scenes start and end abruptly, take us forward and backward in time at a drop of a hat, and there's very little lead in or rhyme to the next cut. This is some of the sloppiest editing I've seen in a straight drama in a while. Not that the movie is much to look at to begin with. Despite being set in New York City, the film's visual style is charmless, and uses none of the city's character to its advantage.

As Righteous Kill wheezes to the finish line, it falls on that all reliable cliche where the villain holds the hero at gunpoint, and just won't stop talking. The killer drones on and on about why they did what they did, and what led them to it. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, and it only got worse from there, but I'm not going to ruin the surprise. Let's just say that if either De Niro or Pacino win an honorary award for their life's work, and they show a montage of their past films, we won't be seeing any clips from the climax, or most likely any other moment that came before it.

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