Movie Review: Righteous Kill

I like how Righteous Kill was initially advertised as if it’s the first movie ever to feature superstars Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino together even though they had done 2 movies together before. One of the movies of course being The Godfather Part II and the other being one of my all-time favorites – Heat. The previews didn’t say “Their Back!” rather, “Their Finally Together!” In other words you could tell right away that this movie was going to live solely off the two actor’s fame instead of having any real originality in the story. With that being said Righteous Kill was predictable, but not necessarily bad.

They could have almost named this movie Heat 2, the only major difference is Robert DeNiro stars as Tom “Turk” Cowan, a veteran New York City police detective alongside his 30 year partner David “Rooster” Fisk (Al Pacino) and they work together to identify the possible connections between a recent series of serial murders throughout the city. When the evidence is put together it begins to look like the murderer may be a fellow NYPD officer. Righteous Kill sounds like it could be a good thriller with a lot of awesome actors, I mean John Leguizamo also makes a great detective, and I’m glad to see him in some movies again. But in the end the story is drawn out and it’s somewhat uneventful. The acting was very good, decent dialogue, and there was nice attention to detail when revealing all of the clues in the story etc. But I expected so much more, I had hoped there was more to this movie than just the hype but there wasn’t.

Righteous Kill will make a good rental, and the movie may be worth owning for die hard DeNiro/Pacino fans, but outside of that it’s going to be pretty forgettable. It just wasn’t great.