Movie Review – Righteous Kill [2008]

 Righteous Kill

Starring: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino

Runtime: 110 minutes

OVERALL: C

The first thing this movie does it remind you of The Boondock Saints. You have a good guy, killing bad guys. As you would expect, Pacino and De Niro deliver fantastic performances. John Leguizamo and Donnie Walberg also play excellent supporting roles.

At the start of the movie, we hear Robert De Niro narrating a confession, and much of this continues throughout the movie. For the first 100 minutes of this movie, we see a steady spiraling decline of De Niro’s character into madness and rage. The interaction, or passiveness in his actions of Pacino balances the movie well, as the other two detectives (Leguizamo and Walberg) close in on the serial bad-guy killer.

However, the last 10 minutes of the movie completely ruin the journey. John Avnet (who produced  such ejaculate filled movies such as Homeward Bound, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Steal This Movie, Inspector Gadget, etc) and penman Russell Geriwitz (of Inside Man) decide to throw in a retarded plot twist at the end. Knowing of Inside Man’s clusterfuck ending, it should have been no surprise that great performances by two of our most respected actors would be completely blown by the trend to mindfuck the viewer at the end.

You see, there’s this trend right now that if you can’t guess the ending of a movie, it’s good. You’ll go into work and say, “Dude, you so won’t guess the ending, you have to go see it.” Unfortunately, these are too often thrown in last minute, destroying the first 7/8 of the movie. This is the case here.

[SPOILER ALERTS]

The whole movie is telling you that De Niro is the killer. It makes sense, and for the most part, Pacino is a supporting actor, little is devulged about him. Then right at the end, bam, we learn that all of those 1st person shots were from his point of view.

The movie wasted a brilliant 100 minutes of acting for 5 minutes of shock value and water-cooler talk.