Screen legends Robert De Niro and Al Pacino team up with director Jon
Avnet in Righteous Kill, a thinly sketched, utterly pedestrian cop
thriller that pivots on a very predictable twist ending. An unworthy
vehicle for its stars’ talents, the movie plays like an episodic small
screen crime serial lazily blown up for the big screen.

The film opens with black-and-white footage of a confession to 14 slayings, and then winds its way back an indeterminate amount of time, introducing Turk (De Niro) and Rooster (Pacino), two veteran New York City cops. The long-time partners share some sympathies with a vigilante killer, The Poetry Boy, who’s offing pimps, murderers and other thugs who otherwise beat the legal system, and leaving calling cards of rhymed composition at the crime scenes. Turk and Rooster start investigating drug dealer Marcus “Spider” Smith (rapper 50 Cent, né Curtis Jackson), but get pulled into the serial killer case.

A hard-edged forensic specialist, Karen Corelli (Carla Gugino), helps out with some crime scene analysis; complicating factors is her relationship with Turk. Two junior detectives, Perez and Riley (John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg), are also brought in to work with the wily veterans. They quickly come to suspect that the killer is a cop — maybe even Turk, who seems eager to knock down any theories that the Poetry Boy has a badge.

Watching Righteous Kill, one feels as if they’ve tripped back in time and landed smack dab in the middle of some anonymous, straight-to-video thriller from the 1980s. There’s no pop to the pacing, no intrigue or slickness applied to the homicidal stagings, which are flatly captured in stand-alone form. In short, there’s no excitement here, or legitimate tension. Instead, Avnet and cinematographer Denis Lenoir try to manufacture forward-leaning energy by occasionally deploying a couple different stylistic gimmicks, from split-screen psychiatric interviews and point-of-view hand-held camerawork to flash-forward bits from the aforementioned confession video. This lack of a codifying visual scheme only underscores the narrative’s weakness.

The film’s indistinct screenplay, by Russell Gewirtz (Inside Man), offers up righteously thin lead characterizations, which on a certain level makes its eventual reversals play more smoothly, yet without any real consequence. The personal relationship between Turk and Karen, who’s into rough sexual roleplay, is especially baffling in its cursoriness, and the junior detectives — integral to driving the investigatory plot, and thus Turk’s increasing agitation — aren’t given enough front-and-center time.

A few incongruous moments of pop cultural humor pop up (one of the victims’ surnames is Brady, spawning a joke about Brady Bunch), but there’s never a sense that these jokes flow from character, that they’re anything more than a couple tossed-off bits of generic “color.” The script is perhaps best defined as being beset by missed opportunities and unexploited pay-offs; the latter is most egregiously true in a violent sequence that feeds the finale and yet is crucially not referenced by characters, rendering it inconsequential and false.

Older but tanner and slimmer than his counterpart, Pacino plays things more subdued than in many of his recent films. De Niro, meanwhile, trades in moderately restrained variations of moves we’ve seen in some of his previous hothead characters. Even if familiar, there is certainly a residual trace affection from seeing the two exercise their craft in the same frame, but Righteous Kill slowly drains that thrill. For the original review, from Screen International, click here. (Overture, R, 100 minutes)

The weighty mouthful of a title is somewhat ironic counterpoint for
this quiet, mannered tale of how we feel most acutely distance from
those genetically closest to us. Adapted from a novel by Yiyun Li,
Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is a slow-played, smartly observed movie about familial reconciliation and rapprochement that only unravels at the very end.

A retired widower from Beijing, Mr. Shi (Henry O, above right) comes to Los Angeles to visit his cool-to-the-touch adult daughter, Yilan (Faye Yu, above left), who’s recently undergone a divorce. Her isolation and estrangement from her father is palpable; Yilan barely conceals her irritation at having to explain things to him, or having him ask the definitions of certain words, and it’s obvious that his gentle chidings (“You subscribe to the newspaper — you should read it”) enormously get under her skin.

With Yilan at work during the day, and concocting excuses to stay out at night, Mr. Shi is a purposefully orphaned house guest, so he wanders down to the local park, where he meets a friendly Iranian woman (Vida Ghahremani). Without a common language, they resort to expressing themselves to one another using a mixture of their respective languages and broken English. Mr. Shi, a former rocket scientist, confesses to her he was frequently absent as a father, and doesn’t understand his daughter. As Yilan drifts further away, though, Mr. Shi endeavors to get to the heart of the mystery surrounding her unhappiness.

Wang (The Joy Luck Club, Smoke) has a nice touch with actors, and his cast here is characteristically wonderful. Elegantly spare in its construction and production design, the film often unfolds in echo-overlap scenes (Yilan and her father at home eating dinner, Mr. Shi in the park with his new friend) that fit together like Russian nesting dolls, with minute differences and coded dialogue exchanges (Mr. Shi musters an apology by way of conversational observance that the world would be a better place if parents were first grandparents) giving us small new insights into the characters.

While there are a few bits of social misunderstanding (Mr. Shi is baffled by the men-seeking-men personals in the newspaper, and inquires about the etymology of K-U-M, versus the word “come”), they’re not played broadly, or for laughs, but rather quietly, to highlight cultural alienation. There’s a certain beauty in all this restraint — Wang’s film reminds one that many screen storytelling conventions diverge from the clipped manner in which we converse and interact in real life — but the movie, in its final lap, also leaves one a bit wanting.

Wang sets up some fascinating generational and geographical stalemates. When the knives finally do come out, Yilan movingly articulates the discomfort she feels speaking her native language, given the uncommunicativeness she witnessed in her parents; despite feeling like a bit of a stranger in America, she feels at home with English. Yet Mr. Shi’s cathartic revelation takes place in unrealistic overheard fashion, and so A Thousand Years of Good Prayers feels a bit unresolved. Perhaps that’s a minority cultural commentary within a larger cultural commentary, but it also feels like a bit of a cop-out. For the original review, from H Magazine, click here. (Magnolia, unrated, 83 minutes)