Reel Politique: Movie Review, Righteous Kill
When I think of getting the two “best actors of their generation” together after a long drought, what I have in mind is not The Godfather Part II, a real masterpiece but a film in which they appear in separate sections, nor Mann’s equally masterly Heat, in which they have basically one scene together which was apparently shot in a cross cutting manner to disguise the fact that they were rarely in the same room together to shoot the scene. When finally comes the chance to put Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in a film together, one that is going to be both an action film and a cop story, I have in mind something like, say, Lethan Weapon, or Rush Hour, or even Hollywood Homicide.
Instead, with Righteous Kill, one gets dour, depressing cop and serial killer movie that puts you in mind of the Saw series than some of the great and funny buddy cop films from the past. It’s directed by Jon Avnet, more notable for Friend Green Tomatoes, Up Close and Personal, and Red Corner. Either he is viewed in Hollywood as an guy who can handle the big stars and their egos, or he is actually liked by actors because they think he gets good performances out of him (the otherwise obscure Jeremiah Chechik has a similar reputation). Helmer of only nine feature films, he has worked a lot in American TV, significantly on the gimmicky Boom Town. His previous outing with Pacino was another serial killer movie called 88 Minute which almost went straight to video but somehow ended up released to the screens shortly before Righteous Kill.
But the true auteur of Righteous Kill is, in fact, the writer, Russell Gewirtz, whose previous big film was Inside Man, which was helmed with unusual modesty by Spike Lee (though the director couldn’t help but include the shot characteristic of all his “joints,” that of a man floating behind a tracking camera. I doubt if Gewirtz wrote that shot into the script). Inside Man begins with a guy talking to a video tape camera, as does Righteous Kill. It’s also about vigilantes, as you eventually figure out. Both highlight uneasy relations between cops and other first responders. Inside Man also has the virtue of being a rather clever heist film, putting it up there with Quick Change, from which it borrows a trope, and few other masterpieces of the genre. In any case, Inside Man is a much more enjoyable, expansive, “insiderish” tale of telling truth to power.
Righteous Kill tells the story of two oddly nicknamed cops, Turk (Robert De Niro) and Rooster (Al Pacino). They end up pursuing a vigilante who offs criminals who slip through the fingers of justice, and indeed, their boss (Brian Dennehy) and practically everyone else in the movie thinks that Turk is the serial killer. However, if one listens carefully to the video tape Turk is making at the start of the movie, and knows the names of the characters, then it is obvious who the real killer happens to be. Moreover, the killer turns to his crimes because he is disillusioned with a mentor, a not fully explained or realized thread of the film. To break up the monotony of killing, crime scene, dust up between Turk and someone else, Carla Gugino is shipped in for a few scenes as a sexually adventurous crime scene investigator.
This is not a “fun” movie, which it could have been despite its grim subject matter. The film is shot in murky ill lit close ups drained of color, the pace and tone are odd and off, and you come away feeling that this grimy, murky world is not worth visiting, unlike, say, the vision that Fincher brings to a similarly distopian se7en. And I suppose a dedicated movie reviewer could write a virtual treatise or a whole book on the historic union of De Niro and Pacino, which is supposed to be a big deal, the way Hoffman and Hackman finally appearing together was promoted by the manufacturers of Runaway Jury. But really all the viewer sees is a pair of actors who are separate anthologies of ticks and twitches that we’ve seen in all too many previous movies, sometimes to our amusement, some times to our irritation. It’s useless to complain about the “great promise” of the Godfather stars dissipated by so many bad choices (especially De Niro, so frequently miscast) and ill-directed movies. After all, there is so much we don’t know about what goes on behind the scenes, and the movie business is a cruel mistress filled with highly neurotic people utterly unlike their screen personas who go through mysterious phases of incompetence (De Niro in the 1980s, say, or Tom Cruise and his mysterious “mask” phase). All we know, all we have is what’s on the screen, and here Pacino and De Niro, while competent, seem to be in a conspiracy to deny the viewers and their fans the visceral narrative and gestural pleasure that perhaps they think is a childish desire on the part of spectators.