De Niro and Pacino. Titans of the big screen with three Academy Awards and countless accolades between them.
Despite more than 30 years of incendiary performances, these acting heavyweights have only appeared face to face once, for a few fleeting minutes in Michael Mann's celebrated 1995 thriller Heat.
Righteous Kill finally unites the goodfellas, castin
g them as grizzled cop buddies on the trail of a serial murderer.
Alas, Jon Avnet's thriller, penned by Russell Gewirtz (Inside Man), isn't big or ballsy enough to warrant its place in cinema history.
There's scant rapport between the leading men, no meaty one-liners or put-downs, and their characters embark on linear emotional journeys that are an insult to De Niro and Pacino's formidable talents.
Moreover, screenwriter Gewirtz commits the cardinal sin of cheating to pull off his final-reel twist.
After 30 years of loyal service, NYPD detectives Turk (Robert De Niro) and Rooster (Al Pacino) know every nook and cranny of the city's underworld.
When a suspected child molester turns up dead with a four-line poem placed on his body, Lieutenant Hingis (Brian Dennehy) asks Turk and Rooster to investigate.
The modus operandi recalls earlier cases, leading the cops to join forces with detectives Perez (John Leguizamo) and Riley (Donnie Wahlberg).
As the body and poem counts rise, drug dealer Spider (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson) provides invaluable clues to the serial killer's identity, which lead Turk and Rooster to suspect the culprit may be one of their own.
Righteous Kill opens with a video confessional from the killer, then pieces together the fractured narrative in flashback. When we reach
the denouement and see
the confessional in context, we realise we have been hoodwinked. De Niro and Pacino go through the motions, with solid if forgettable performances from Jackson and co. Clichés stack up quicker than bullet casings until a moving final scene that is too little too late.
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