Righteous Kill

Please don’t stink. Please don’t stink. Please don’t stink. Oh no!

Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino star as detectives Turk and Rooster – two hardboiled cops with attitudes, one-liners and a willingness to bend and break the law to put a bad guy in jail by any means necessary. Now, they are hot on the trail of a serial killer who has much the same philosophy. This vigilante has been gunning down people acquitted of horrible crimes when he and everyone else thinks the targets should have been found guilty.

Who is this serial killer who likes to leave behind bad poems and dead bodies?

Can Turk and Rooster find him?

Do they want to?

This movie shouldn’t star DeNiro and Pacino. It should star Corey Haim and Corey Feldman. Righteous Kill is a cliché-filled, badly written, mostly boring thriller that borders on parody and campy most of the time.

If it wasn’t for the occasional horrifying piece of dialogue that makes you laugh because it is so bad, the audience might become as sleepy as DeNiro and Pacino.

Where’s the energy? Where’s the excitement? DeNiro and Pacino getting together on screen should result in the most compelling, earsplitting, explosive screaming matches you could ever imagine, but both men, two of my favorite actors of all time (and 2/3rds of the Holy Trinity of Italian Actors) are sleepwalking throughout the movie.

Writer Russell Gerwitz needs to create something more mysterious, less predictable and less stupid to make us glad Righteous Kill was the film where these two icons teamed up to blow our minds. Instead, you are left realizing each one is far past his prime starring in a movie that isn’t all that special.

Meanwhile, director Jon Avnet is attempting to make a stylized film with all sorts of quick cuts, changing camera angles, dancing babes, slow motion and more, but none of it is interesting since the material is bland and dull. As people have been saying lately, you can’t put lipstick on a pig and expect it to look like Carrie Underwood.

Righteous Kill can’t live up to the hopes held by DeNiro and Pacino fans, and makes everyone else wonder what the big deal was.

Righteous Kill is rated R for violence, pervasive language, some sexuality and brief drug use.