Wednesday, October 01, 2008

RIGHTEOUS KILL - a thriller so devoid of thrills it is actually impossible to spoil the plot

RIGHTEOUS KILL is a lazy, lethargic, deeply dull "thriller" that will only succeed at the Box Office because of the residual respect audiences have for the early work of Robert de Niro and Al Pacino. We are so infatuated with movies like SCARFACE and THE GODFATHER that we refuse to admit the obvious: Pacino and De Niro are working to pay the bills: applying no quality control to the scripts that they accept; and falling into pastiche of their tough-guy foul-mouthed iconic performances.

As for RIGHTEOUS KILL, this is a movie that declares its hand in the first five minutes. Pacino and De Niro are cops investigating a serial killer. De Niro is shown in flashback, confessing to the murders. He's a vigilante that goes after rapists and paedophiles who walked. These are "righteous kills".

Now, the audience is intelligent. We know we're watching a thriller. If a killer is presented to us inside the first ten minutes, we know he's probably innocent. And if Robert De Niro's character is innocent, and there's another heavyweight actor in the cast, it's going to be him. So after fifteen minutes, you know that De Niro's superficially angry cop is innocent; Al Pacino's superficially in-control cop is a vigilante; Carla Gugino as the CSI who likes rough sex is a red herring; and Fifty Cent is a tool.

Game over. Thank you for playing. Please slip into retirement and stop flushing your reputations down the toilet.

RIGHTEOUS KILL is on release in the UK, US, the Philippines, Greece, India, Romania, Israel, Russia, Taiwan, Estonia, Italy, Sweden and Turkey. It opens this weekend in Finland and Spain and next weekend in France, Denmark and Iceland. It opens later in October in Portugal, Belgium and Argentina. It opens on January 8th in the Netherlands.

1 comment:

  1. Lol... Nice Review. We'd gone to watch this flick over the weekend and pretty much gawked for over 30 minutes at those uber craptastic capers. Thankfully the dark knight was running next door and we snuck in for another look at the ghoulish rictus grin

    Cheers
    M

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