Righteous Kill

Righteous Kill is a formulaic murder thriller made watchable by the star power of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino who had previously worked together, in The Godfather II (1974) and Michael Mann's classic 1995 heist movie Heat, albeit never to this extent and who are both well within their comfort zones here.

Detectives Turk (De Niro) and Rooster (Pacino) have been working New York’s mean streets for nearly thirty years as partners and close friends. They are tough old school cops and when they get assigned to tracking down  a vigilante killer bumping off bad guys who have managed to bypass jail time they only get interested when it seems he is also a NYPD cop. 

Avnet (who took Pacino to what is widely regarded as his career low in 2007 with 88 Minutes) and screenwriter Russell Gerwitz set up the movie by opening with Turk confessing to the murders although of course we know it’s not going to be as simple as that. The next 100 minutes is spent with Turk and Rooster doing little more than swapping potty-mouthed, sexist, homophobic dialogue while they track down the killer. Turk gets to bang a lady cop (Carla Gugino) who likes it rough and Detectives Perez (John Leguizamo) and Riley (Donnie Wahlberg) are brought in to keep the thin plot more or less padded out. Unfortunately the comme il faut twist is so improbable as to leave us feeling unfairly hoodwinked.

There is actually a potentially interesting aspect to the relationship between Turk and Rooster which is touched upon in the big expository reveal at the film's end when Rooster explains his actions but it is in truth fairly tenuous and, probably wisely, does not get explored (related to this surely the film's resolution  means that the child-killer Charles Randall, played by Frank John Hughes, will go free, something which seems to defeat both Turk and Rooster's motivation from the outset).  Instead, Righteous Kill follows the path that innumerable films of its ilk have done before it and no doubt will do in the future, just not with actors who you’d think (or given their late careers, perhaps not) would expect more of themselves.

FYI: The drug-dealing club owner, Spider, is played by gangsta rapper 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson).

 

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