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De Niro and Pacino swap expletives as they go in hot pursuit of some poetic justice in Righteous Kill |
Star pair chase world’s versed serial murderer
RIGHTEOUS KILL
Directed by Jon Avnet
Certificate 18
DE Niro! Pacino! Together in a hard-boiled New York cop thriller!
Oh how it must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
But the problem with these two craggy-faced thesps is that seeing them perform side by side is too much like going to a Rolling Stones gig: nice to be able to say you’ve seen Mick and the boys together, but, essentially, if you want to hear them at their best, you’ve got to stick on an album cut in the 1960s.
With these two old dogs, get the The Deer Hunter or Dog Day Afternoon on DVD.
This style of buddy-buddy cop film has been done many times before, but director Jon Avnet does his best to include crowd-pleasing elements. This includes making De Niro’s character, nicknamed Turk, a classic, Sarah Palin-admiring, blue-collar boy.
As the moose hunter’s popularity testifies, there can be no denying the romance Americans feel for this social group – they are seen as the backbone of industrious middle America.
When De Niro says: “It was either a badge and a gun, or a hard hat and a jack hammer,” his character is speaking directly to a target audience who the writer condescendingly assumes may enjoy this turgid fare.
It’s just one of a number of stereotypes: rapper 50 Cent naturally plays a drug-dealing nightclub owner whose clientele include rich, beautiful, cocaine-abusing young lawyers. Meanwhile, De Niro and Pacino (called Roster) cannot quite work out if they are Irish Americans or Italian Americans – but we know they are both Catholics as they frequently refer to their loss of said faith while crossing themselves in church.
Righteous Kill roughly goes like this: the partners are on their last case. Turk is Mr Angry, and delivers us a quick sob story to show why he is so full of rage. His wife died young, leaving him with a little girl to bring up. We know he has a temper on him and likes to give the criminals he pinches a bit of a kicking too.
We discover the pair framed a man for a crime he didn’t commit – he had got off for murdering a child and they decided to fix him for another misdemeanour.
Then, as their retirement approaches, they are put on the trail of a serial killer who leaves terrible poems at the scenes of his crimes. He is bumping off a motley collection of rapists, pimps, drug dealers and murderers, and therefore has the sympathy of our two grizzled officers before they realise that perhaps the killer is some kind of cop gone loopy.
The serial killer’s trademark (in this case the ridiculous poetry) is totally unbelievable, and it doesn’t help that the verses seem to have come from the pen of William McGonagall, the Scottish poet recently voted the world’s worst – “this man deserved to be killed, and now his body will be chilled.” Hmmm.
Another letdown is the lack of banter between the two. The script does not zing. I gave up counting the number of F-words used when I reached 1,678. Ok, that’s not quite true, but the C, U, K and F keys on the scriptwriters’ computer took a battering.
And although we know De Niro can deliver the word with aplomb, it’s effect is diluted by the fact he swears when he is putting the kettle on.
Righteous Kill brings two much-loved and well-versed actors together and then ruins it all by giving them such a cliché-ridden load of drivel the studio didn’t dare release the flick in the States – it went straight to DVD. |
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