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Scowly Bob And Shouty Al | Don’t get your hopes up, Heat fans: De Niro and Pacino don’t set off any acting fireworks in Righteous Kill

RIGHTEOUS KILL
Directed by Jon Avnet. Starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Carla Gugino, John Leguizamo. Opens Fri, Sept 12.
** 1/2

Casting big guns like Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in the lead roles can be a serious misstep for a middling movie like Jon Avnet’s Righteous Kill. What should be an implausible but potentially entertaining cop thriller becomes overburdened once these two raddled, scowling Oscar-winners climb on board, so much so that they pretty much capsize the movie.

I won’t say too much about the plot, as there are probably moviegoers who will be drawn by the marquee pairing of De Niro and Pacino — though it strains the memory to come up with anything either actor has done lately to merit that kind of brand loyalty — and there’s no reason to spoil whatever enjoyment they’re likely to get. Suffice it to say, there’s a serial killer loose in the streets of New York, one who could well be wielding a badge. And suffice it to say that Righteous Kill is no Heat, the Michael Mann cops-and-robbers epic that so effectively leveraged the headlining pair’s mega-stardom.

De Niro and Pacino star as Turk and Rooster, a pair of veteran cops who, let’s say, have their own way of doing things. Hopefully the NYPD isn’t so hard up that they’d continue to press into service detectives who are 65 and 68 respectively, no matter how scary they might be. When a sting to take down a flashy drug dealer (Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent, in a mercifully truncated bit of typecasting) ends in a hail of bullets and dead gangsta bodyguard, Turk and Rooster are subjected to an internal investigation and sent to a shrink to work out their issues related to rage and shooting suspects.

When not muttering threats and kicking handcuffed perps, De Niro’s Turk carries on an affair with a foxy fellow detective (Carla Gugino) who likes it rough and thinks a senior citizen is just the kind of fellow to give her a good seeing-to. He and Rooster also have an unfriendly rivalry going with colleagues Perez and Riley (John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg) — perhaps their onscreen antagonism was fueled by the fact that the younger actors are much more believable as New York cops than their seasoned counterparts.

At bottom, Righteous Kill is as simplistic and vaguely nonsensical as its generic title, its effectiveness as compelling narrative based on a feat of misdirection that might have worked if its scenery-chewing leading men didn’t give you cause to think there should be a lot more to it than that. But there’s a jarring lack of rigour in the movie’s plotting that makes it about as easy to take seriously as Meet the Parents or whatever dreck Pacino most recently rented his name to. It feels like screenwriter Russell Gewirtz, who also wrote Spike Lee’s twisty heist flick Inside Man, came up with the beginning and ending and then chose the most expedient route between those two points. The price of your ticket doesn’t even give you one of Pacino’s trademark frothing rants.

Director Avnet (who also directed Pacino in last year’s awful 88 Minutes) tries to cover up the script’s shortcomings with rote stylistic overkill—split screens, handheld POV shots of violence and a distracting tendency to frame everyone so that their eyebrows are almost touching the top of the movie screen — right down to the atmospherically lit climax in an abandoned warehouse that felt so familiar I was sure I had previously dreamed it.

Then again, it’s possible that I’m looking at this all wrong. Maybe De Niro and Pacino have reached the Shatner stage in their careers, where everything they do is a clever postmodern riff on the larger-than-life personas they built over the two decades they were doing respectable work. It’s possible, but I doubt it.