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 shocking 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
ridiculously named 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 then 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 passionately invested in knocking 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, director Jon 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 wan banter and 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 any of the present 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. Just set your TiVo to capture their shared scene in Michael Mann’s Heat instead.

Presented on DVD in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen with a Dolby 5.1 surround sound audio mix, Righteous Kill is housed in a regular plastic Amray case with accompanying cardboard slipcover, and benefits from a superb transfer that is free from edge enhancement or blips, and marked by color consistency and deep blacks. A static menu screen gives way to chapter-titled scene selection, and audio options that include a feature-length audio commentary track from Avnet. There’s also a 14-minute making-of featurette that, despite a lack of contributions from Pacino, otherwise exhibits a fairly deep interviewee roster. Producers Randall Emmett, Rob Cowan and Daniel Rosenberg all get face time, as well as Avnet and almost every other actor with more than three speaking lines — including Trilby Glover, and even prankster skateboarder Rob Drydek, who gets maybe five seconds of menacing screen time before he promptly gets popped and plays a corpse the rest of his single scene. (The diminutive Drydek’s appearance in the film — maybe part of some weird street-cred grab amongst suburban teenage Vans-gazers — does prompt the unintentionally hilarious high point of the featurette, though, when Avnet says, “The idea of a skateboarding pimp just felt right.”) It’s also kind of funny when De Niro talks about working with 50 Cent, and jokes that he wants to get him to teach him to rap.

Apart from the original theatrical trailer and previews for three other Overture/Anchor Bay DVD releases, the disc’s only other supplemental feature is a 19-minute mini-documentary, entitled “The Thin Blue Line: An Exploration of Cops and Criminals” and narrated in strangely upbeat fashion, which examines the cultural imperative of swallowed silence in the ranks of police officers. Author Philip Bonifacio and others talk about the psychological effects of investigative police work, and former lieutenant Samuel Clark, who served a 100-day suspension without pay after having the temerity to report a fellow officer who assaulted him, speaks compellingly about the at-odds missions of working to expose crime and corruption, while also policing “insiders” who would seek to do the same against their own fraternity in blue. It’s all interesting, but also a bit scattershot, and too much of a mouthful for such a short running time; stretch it out to 45 minutes to an hour and you have a terrific, PBS-type stand-alone show. To purchase the Righteous Kill DVD via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) C+ (Disc)