Righteous Kill
by Jon Avnet
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DVD details
Actor: Al Pacino, Carla Gugino, Curtis 50 Cent Jackson, Robert De NiroDirector: Jon Avnet
Brand: STARZ/SPHE
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 100 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2009-01-06
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Anchor Bay - ITN
Product features:
- After 30 years as partners in the pressure cooker environment of the NYPD, highly decorated Detectives "Turk", played by Academy Award winner Robert De Niro (Raging Bull) and "Rooster", played by Academy Award winner Al Pacino (Scent of a Woman) should be ready for retirement. But, before they can hang up their badges, they are called in to investigate the murder of a notorious pimp, which appears
DVD Reviews of Righteous Kill
DVD Review: DeNiro, Pacino, Jackson, Cugino, et. al., excellent
Summary: 4 Stars
Very well constructed story of Police vigilante-ism, if you will, with superb casting. Best performances are from DeNiro, Cugino, and Jackson.
Movie stalls with some in-your-freakin'-face-feminism - nothing wrong with that - but Cugino as Detective [see below], and a successful 25 year old daughter who calls from California to assure De Niro he's a real cop, plus an ex-addict who actually helps DeNiro and Pacino on a case, are unnecesssary.
Actually, Cugino is so strong in this role, I'm convinced she should have played Pacino's part! Although the character she did play is pivotal to the plot resolution, it still is one which strains credulity: a Cop who loves to bed Cops and other guys who perform dangerous tasks. It would have been more interesting if she played a kind of recovering "call girl" who tries *not* to fall in love with her favorite client. Stereotypical, yes, but tell me that wouldn't have worked!
Curtis Jackson should have a huge career in movies as a result of his work here - he takes command of every frame.
DVD Review: Violates a cardinal rule--somewhat like "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari."
Summary: 4 Stars
De Niro and Pacino don't disappoint as a pair of hardened, slightly "off-kilter" cops with DeNiro, in particular, appearing to be a head case, a character whose interest in police work, it's strongly implied, is directly traceable to a strong, explosive, sado-masochistic strain in his relation not just to the bad guys but to authority and women. The problem with the film is the length to which it goes ("whatever it takes") to hook the viewer and keep him snapping at the bait.
All films are manipulative, but problems arise when the manipulation is totally contrary to the viewer's expectations and trust. It's one thing to see a sci-fi space fantasy in 3-D (in which case, I say "make me a passenger on your psychedelic roller coaster--sweep me into some other world or orbit"), but it's quite another to confront what is represented as a "realistic" police drama, purporting, moreover, to take us into the psyches of the main characters. In this latter case, we as viewers have no choice but to invest our trust in the director and his devices--above all in the accuracy of the fictive world along with the boundaries and signposts that have been established as standards of judgment, enabling the viewer to make sense of the characters and the "reality" they function in. Unfortunately, in the case of "Righteous Kill" that trust is totally violated.
When a film opens with a character giving a testimony, as if under oath, then that same character necessarily comes to serve as our sole reference for the reliability, or "verisimilitude," of the world of the film. He becomes our eyes, our standard of reference, our "point of view" in place of the objective camera lens. If at the end of the film, that character suddenly tells us that he's lied to us from the first frame, we may not exactly have cause to ask for a refund (all great fiction amounts to a "lie that tells the truth"), but we do have a right to feel, if not betrayed, a trifled disappointed and irritated. Imagine Jane Austen saving the last sentence of "Pride and Prejudice" for a statement such as: "By the way, everything I've just written about Elizabeth Bennett in the foregoing 300 pages is a complete lie. She's a horrible person who can be expected to behave toward Darcy as Lady Macbeth did to Macbeth."
Manipulation is one thing (Wayne Booth, a former teacher of mine, calls it the "rhetoric of fiction"), but outright deception feels less like influencing or even tricking the witness (i.e. you and me) than plain and simple "cheating." In a good movie (Hitchcock is always a reliable example) the director and the viewer are engaged in a game, or even a contest, the spectator getting many of his kicks from trying to stay a step ahead of the director. It can be fun, even exhilarating, entertainment--you win a few, you lose a few. But say the director--for example, Billy Wilder at the end of "Double Indemnity"--suddenly reveals that everything you've heard from Fred MacMurray is the exact opposite of the story you "thought" you had just heard. That's not mere "manipulation": that's substituting another movie for the one you've just seen! (Reminds me of Humphrey Bogart and the "African Queen" making a brief appearance in the desert in Bing Crosby-Bob Hope's "Road to Bali." But in that instance, our expectations have been conditioned to accept such absurdities. In the case of "Righteous Kill," I wasn't adequately prepared to expect the same sorts of absurdities. You might even say that the "righteous" one is the director, who self-servingly abuses his authority (or "author"-ship) in what amounts to a regrettable "breach of trust" from the viewer's point of view.
Why 4 stars? Frankly, I'm not sure (you're free to go much lower, or even higher). The film did hold my interest, and it had me guessing throughout, with some juicy Hitchcock-worthy red herrings (until the very end, when I felt like I'd been watching the wrong movie). Moreover, Deniro and Pacino are great actors individually and collectively, and both are on their game; both "age well" and, if the script deserves some blame, it should not be at the expense of the actors. Finally, I would rather be lied to by an otherwise intelligent movie than patronized and insulted. Too many movies are formulaic commodities designed, with Pavolian, formulaic, marketplace certainty, to empty the consumer's wallet. "Righteous Kill" never stoops that low.
Finally, one of the respected, "classic" films of all time--hated by the Marxist director Eisenstein but practically serving as the prototype of German psychoanalytic cinema--is "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari." It pulls much the same trick as "Righteous Kill," waiting until the film's final moment to reveal that the film's narrator, in whom we as spectators have necessarily placed our trust, is in fact a mad man in an insane asylum. What's the difference? Is there a difference? For one thing, whereas Caligari gives us an apparently sane narrator who proves a lunatic, "Righteous Kill" gives us an apparently semi-pathological narrator who, ultimately, proves an "all right" kind of guy.
Perhaps the main difference is that "Caligari" has a message about an insane, paranoid, totalitarian world: it's use of the deceptive narrator is integral with, if not crucial to, that message. The film seems to want us to recognize the wolf in sheep's clothing or, in this instance, the pending Hitler who at first seems so seductively rational. "Righteous Kill," on the other hand, has no such message--or, if one insists, the film says no more than "guys who seem sinister, tough or plain nasty can turn out O.K. if you wait until the end of the movie." Similar, perhaps, to "Caligari" but not quite the same--and not quite enough.
DVD Review: I thought it was pretty good
Summary: 4 Stars
The truth is DeNiro and Pacino have both made some very humdrum movies in recent years, but this isn't one of them. Yes, DeNiro has seemingly played this role 1,000 times before, but Pacino's character has a bit more originality. Both are jaded NYPD vets, but still with a few good days left in them. The bad guys, except for 50 Cent, are all pretty forgettable. And though Brian Dennehy plays the cop boss, he isn't given much to do. The movie is all about DeNiro and Pacino. The pacing is quick, and the dialogue is relatively smart. Enough twists to make this worthwhile.DVD Review: Righteous Kill
Summary: 4 Stars
I found this movie to have a solid storyline which keeps you guessing who's the guilty person turns out to be until the end.DVD Review: Righteous Kill
Summary: 5 Stars
Righteous Kill was an amazing drama/action movie. The movie really made you think you know who the killer is but then you get lots of twists and turns. The acting was amazing. Al Pachino was brilliant and very entertaining. Robert Deniro did a great job as well playing a hot headed cop. The movie it ended on a great level.
Description of Righteous Kill
Turk and Rooster, two aging NYPD detectives who have been longtime partners are faced with a serial killer who is murdering sociopathic criminals. They both have personal issues, and when they start working with a younger team, Perez and Riley, tensions between the pairs of partners is inevitable, especially since Turk is now living with Perez's ex-girlfriend, also a homicide detective.
Righteous Kill pairs two cinematic icons whose previous screen collaboration, Michael Mann's 1995 Heat, was absolutely electrifying despite minimal time together in a long movie. Now in their mid-60s, De Niro and Pacino are playing veteran cops who, despite being grizzled, should look much younger than these actors. The incongruent casting makes the dark story improbable from the get-go, and things get worse as dialogue by screenwriter Russell Gurwitz quickly sounds like a parody of vintage cop movie cliches. It's a strain to find anything that works. The two leads play longtime detectives and partners whose weariness with rapists, murderers, pedophiles and other villains appears linked to the acts of a serial killer taking out bad guys who got away with heinous crimes. A videotape confession by De Niro's tightly-coiled Turk--who has been seeking the killer with Pacino's Rooster--would seem to establish his ties to the events. But the movie isn't over until it's over, assuming one is still with the movie after plodding along with its facsimile of noir conviction. Director Jon Avnet never gets a handle on Righteous Kill's gritty heart, superficially pushing suspense along with heavy-handed editing, and adding unpersuasive sauce in the form of Turk's somewhat S&M sexual relationship with a female cop (Carla Gugino). Giving the proceedings sort of a boost are Donnie Wahlberg and John Leguizamo as a younger pair of sleuths working the same case. This could easily have been a better movie with those two in the leads. --Tom Keogh
Stills from Righteous Kill (Click for larger image)
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