This movie is a very contrived vehicle for Robert De Niro and Al Pacino with almost nothing to recommend it that I could discern. It contains every cop movie cliché in the book, lots of 'manly' dialogue and ends with our two cop buddies spouting deathbed philosophy.
On a broad scale, movies come in three sorts;
1. Stories that just have to written, because they need to be told. Often these are based on real events. Then someone thinks about how to put it on screen and who might be good actors to cast in the various roles.
2. The truly vivid, memorable imaginings of someone really creative who wants to construct an entertaining fantasy. Then, as in number 1, someone thinks about who might be good actors to cast in the various roles.
3. Highly contrived (and often unlikely) vehicles for Big Names, who want to make another movie, and may have convinced a studio exec that they can fill a few seats in movie houses. And get paid a lot.
In other words, in 1 and 2 the story comes first and in 3, the actor comes first. I'm a big fan of the first two, and very dubious about the third. And I'm afraid Righteous Kill comes squarely in category 3. I didn't actually hate it, but it overwhelmed me with indifference. And I used to love these guys!
De Niro (Turk) and Pacino (Rooster) and even the names put me off are two veteran (very veteran, but more of that later) New York cops. They are working a case which appears to involve a serial killer who has set himself up as judge and jury to take out the nasty people the courts let off. They may or may not have put the wrong person away for a murder some years before. The sticky, serial killer, finger of guilt is pointing inexorably to it being one of their own, a cop. It's really just a case of staying awake long enough to establish which one of our tough guy, anti-heroes it is.
Now it seemed so blindingly obvious to me within the first half an hour who the guilty party was, that I thought it must be a double bluff. You know, it's so obviously X, that it must really be Y, but, hey, that's too simple too so really it's X after all but we're supposed to think it's Y etc. But no. It really was that simple. It was X all the time, and any double bluff was merely my over-active imagination striving to keep me interested. (Although I will say in the movie's defense that my spouse didn't 'get it' until the very end. Unfortunately that may say more about him than it does about the movie! He'd had a tough week at work.)
I hate to have to say this, but De Niro and Pacino are just too old to convincingly play tough guys any more. Pacino bears a passing resemblance to Keith Richards these days, and although De Niro may have weathered slightly better, I kept thinking as I watched this, that no studio would ever cast two grizzled women in their sixties as street wise cops, so why am I ( a grizzled woman in my 50s) supposed to find these two guys convincing? The female characters are the usual run of plain but virtuous, weeping rape victims and semi-clothed quasi hookers, beloved of tough guy cop movies, except for the token CSI copette Karen Corelli (Carla Gugino) who is, of course, a stunner. (She appears both clothed and semi clothed.)
We see very little of her professional aptitude, but our Karen loves nothing more than a bit of rough sex with Turk and as there are only some 28 years between Gugino and De Niro, I should probably be grateful she wasn't bonking Rooster. In one particularly gratuitous scene Karen gets sexually aroused by Turks' vivid description of the violence inflicted on a suspect, which is doubtless intended to get that vital 18-30 male demographic giggling, but should really have the whole NYC female police corps out on strike in protest. At the vital moment she loses her bottle and can't shoot the bad guy.
Sigh I just find such sexist tripe so tedious these days. I can't imagine where my sense of humour went? I mean it was funny the first two or three hundred times I saw it. In movie after movie. But now? No thanks.
Definitely 2 thumbs down for this clichéd, hackneyed, tedious B flick. De Niro and Pacino, do you really need the money THAT much?
On a broad scale, movies come in three sorts;
1. Stories that just have to written, because they need to be told. Often these are based on real events. Then someone thinks about how to put it on screen and who might be good actors to cast in the various roles.
2. The truly vivid, memorable imaginings of someone really creative who wants to construct an entertaining fantasy. Then, as in number 1, someone thinks about who might be good actors to cast in the various roles.
3. Highly contrived (and often unlikely) vehicles for Big Names, who want to make another movie, and may have convinced a studio exec that they can fill a few seats in movie houses. And get paid a lot.
In other words, in 1 and 2 the story comes first and in 3, the actor comes first. I'm a big fan of the first two, and very dubious about the third. And I'm afraid Righteous Kill comes squarely in category 3. I didn't actually hate it, but it overwhelmed me with indifference. And I used to love these guys!
De Niro (Turk) and Pacino (Rooster) and even the names put me off are two veteran (very veteran, but more of that later) New York cops. They are working a case which appears to involve a serial killer who has set himself up as judge and jury to take out the nasty people the courts let off. They may or may not have put the wrong person away for a murder some years before. The sticky, serial killer, finger of guilt is pointing inexorably to it being one of their own, a cop. It's really just a case of staying awake long enough to establish which one of our tough guy, anti-heroes it is.
Now it seemed so blindingly obvious to me within the first half an hour who the guilty party was, that I thought it must be a double bluff. You know, it's so obviously X, that it must really be Y, but, hey, that's too simple too so really it's X after all but we're supposed to think it's Y etc. But no. It really was that simple. It was X all the time, and any double bluff was merely my over-active imagination striving to keep me interested. (Although I will say in the movie's defense that my spouse didn't 'get it' until the very end. Unfortunately that may say more about him than it does about the movie! He'd had a tough week at work.)
I hate to have to say this, but De Niro and Pacino are just too old to convincingly play tough guys any more. Pacino bears a passing resemblance to Keith Richards these days, and although De Niro may have weathered slightly better, I kept thinking as I watched this, that no studio would ever cast two grizzled women in their sixties as street wise cops, so why am I ( a grizzled woman in my 50s) supposed to find these two guys convincing? The female characters are the usual run of plain but virtuous, weeping rape victims and semi-clothed quasi hookers, beloved of tough guy cop movies, except for the token CSI copette Karen Corelli (Carla Gugino) who is, of course, a stunner. (She appears both clothed and semi clothed.)
We see very little of her professional aptitude, but our Karen loves nothing more than a bit of rough sex with Turk and as there are only some 28 years between Gugino and De Niro, I should probably be grateful she wasn't bonking Rooster. In one particularly gratuitous scene Karen gets sexually aroused by Turks' vivid description of the violence inflicted on a suspect, which is doubtless intended to get that vital 18-30 male demographic giggling, but should really have the whole NYC female police corps out on strike in protest. At the vital moment she loses her bottle and can't shoot the bad guy.
Sigh I just find such sexist tripe so tedious these days. I can't imagine where my sense of humour went? I mean it was funny the first two or three hundred times I saw it. In movie after movie. But now? No thanks.
Definitely 2 thumbs down for this clichéd, hackneyed, tedious B flick. De Niro and Pacino, do you really need the money THAT much?