And so movie history did not have to settle for that brief but intense scene in “Heat,” the one that finally put the King Kong and Godzilla of the modern crime picture in a single conversation together. There’s much more of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in “Righteous Kill,” this time as cops on a serial-murder case.
“Righteous Kill” is the kind of minor police whodunit that either actor would have scoffed at in their glory years, but it’s about the right speed for now — even if they do look a little mature for their roles as Manhattan detectives.
They’re known as Turk and Rooster (already the movie has the air of a 1970s buddy-cop film), and they’re like an old vaudeville team — a vaudeville team that plants evidence and administers brutal gut-beatings to suspects.
Actually, these guys have a good record, but early in the film we are urged to believe that one of them might be the current serial killer. The gimmicky script, by “Inside Man” author Russell Gerwitz, leads us to a number of red herrings along the way.
Much of the movie’s dramatic weight falls on De Niro’s Turk, who’s thick as beef and nursing a temper. He works out a lot of the anger with his girlfriend, a police forensics type played by Carla Gugino. Her taste for kink gives the movie a bit of interest, although this too begins to feel like a red herring.
Pacino (Rooster, duh) gets to play it lighter — and in case you’ve been keeping score, yes, he is wearing the calf-length leather jacket that seems to follow him from film to film.
In a bid to approximate the masculine swagger of “The Departed,” the rest of the movie is filled with hard-talking hotheads, including Brian Dennehy, John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg, whose brother was in “The Departed.” Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent, lends his extremely mild presence to the role of a drug kingpin.
As iffy as the script is, there must surely be some pleasure to be had from watching these old warhorses do their thing, right? Well, yes. De Niro and Pacino still have some authority, even if they’re not digging deep anymore.
However, director Jon Avnet (who guided Pacino in the unintentionally funny “88 Minutes”) has shot approximately 90 percent of the movie in individual close-ups, which means that even when De Niro and Pacino are in the same room together, we rarely get to see them interacting, playing off each other, finding the moments that actors find together. They could have shot most of their material on different days.
Both men are in their mid-60s, so this is likely their twilight as leading men. If the movie is a hit, of course, maybe the old routine could be dusted off again.
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