Blogorium Review: Righteous Kill

Or, 110 Minutes I'll Never Get Back.

So, like I said: so you wouldn't have to. And for your sake, I hope none of you ever fool yourselves into sitting through Righteous Kill.

Don't get me wrong: I wasn't watching anything better before I started this insultingly stupid waste of time disguised as a mystery. Righteous Kill just happens to be the last thing I saw tonight that was pathetic and totally predictable from minute one. I'm not going to bother saving this for next week because I'm already in a bad mood and thinking about this garbage will only sully an otherwise worthwhile year-end post later on. Let's get this over with.

People might be tempted to say "waste of talent" when they hear about Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in this piece of shit called a movie, but let's face it: they haven't been "Al Pacino" or "Robert De Niro" in years. Maybe not since Heat, which was the last time they were on-screen together and the last time I'll mention that film in the same breath as Righteous Kill.

This downward spiral should be of no surprise to people paying attention. On the one hand, you have Al Pacino the star of 88 Minutes which may be worse than Righteous Kill but I'm not willing to find out*. On the other hand, Robert De Niro who alternates between crap like Meet the Fockers and crap like Hide and Seek. The "legend" part of their resume is long since passed them by, so to hear that they're "finally teaming up" doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

But I watched it, so let's give you a cursory summary, huh?

Pacino and De Niro are two cops who everyone calls Rooster and Turk (for reasons I'll get to in a minute) that did one shady thing a long time ago blah blah blah. All of a sudden criminals connected to them start dying with poetry left at the scene and Internal Affairs gets interested and so do John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg who are also cops but... it doesn't even matter. Throw in Carla Gugino as a love interest for Turk, 50 Cent as a drug lord, Brian Dennehy as their Lieutenant, and start the mystery.

Except that Righteous Kill thinks it's smarter than you are. Or than it is. Because it opens with De Niro's taped "confession" about how he's the killer and he murdered all of these people. Couple that with the fact that the killer is still obscured during the course of the movie and it's pretty easy to figure out where it's going. In fact, the reason that it's necessary to call them Rooster and Turk is because otherwise you'd know that De Niro says his own name early in the "confession" and it's clear his "statement" was written by someone else.

But Righteous Kill insists on maintaining this stupid facade well after it's obvious what's actually going on. Since Pacino is playing "bug eyed bat-shit" Pacino, it's even clearer which one of them is actually doing this, but it doesn't stop director Jon Avnet from putting together a Saw-like montage near the end for anyone stupid enough to still be drooling on themselves in the theatre. Get it? That's how all of this crap happened? Don't you feel embarassed to not say "well duh!"?

So yes, the movie is terrible. It was a colossal waste of time with a cast of "they should have known be- well, that's not true...", but it keeps on prodding forward until the wholly predictable conclusion where everything works out okay because the bad guy who wanted to die dies and the good guy is cleared and anyone with any moral ambiguity simply vanishes from the plot.

Was anything redeeming? I guess if you've ever wanted to see someone blow 50 Cent's brains out, fast forward to near the end of the movie. Then you can watch a patently fake 50 Cent dummy fall through a glass window. Maybe that's worth your rental, but I doubt it.

Honestly, if you need to get you "cop film" jollies out in a tale or sordid cops who break the rules to get things done, you might as well just watch Street Kings. It's bad, but at least it never tries to be smart. How could it with Keanu Reeves?

And that's all you need to know. You won't watch it; I won't talk about it again, end of story. Consider it my present to all of you.




* same director. oh, that's promising...