Jon Peters Reviews: “Righteous Kill”

I have a lot of people that think I’m too down on certain movies, always pessimistic about the modern era of film. At times, I’ll admit, but I love movies. I love them so much I see as many as I can from all genres and years, always searching for something to champion. So when the trailer broke for ‘Righteous Kill’ I was excited. People who know me came up asked my initial thoughts, I said, ‘Yeah I think it could be good actually.’

‘Really?’ they would reply. ‘Pacino and de Niro haven’t made a good movie in years’.

‘Yeah, I know, but this could be like a swan song for them’, I said, ‘This could be a good project for them.’

A cop drama, two aging legends in the same film, hey, I was excited for it. I thought the trailer showed promise but my friends had a point. In this last decade Pacino and de Niro’s output have been pretty bad as of late. Sure, it’s subjective, and at their age, they are probably just looking for some projects that might be fun, different, or interesting. Or maybe a paycheck.

And maybe they don’t care about the script at all. I seriously think that Pacino and de Niro were excited to be together and forgot to see the script, because unfortunately my friends were right, this film is another bad one in the careers.

I don’t want to rip on the script too much, but it is clunky in areas and dull. Outside of some standard tough guy talk and some twists (which can be figured out from watching the trailer), the real culprit is Jon Avnet, the director. He painfully stages every scene in the movie in a medium shot, giving it the presentation like a cop television show. It looks stale because it is and even worse is his framing of these scenes as some things happen in the corners of the frame. Lots of wasted space, something you’d think a director of even the marginal of technical savvy would know about. Maybe Mr. Avnet needs to take an art class to learn about positive and negative space and how to use those to create an interesting composition.

I always feel like Al Pacino and Robert de Niro are fun to watch, but you can tell they are just sleepwalking through this film, Avnet ask for nothing from them. It’s all for a waste, as I’m starting to think Avnet is the Uwe Boll of cop films. His ’88 Minutes’ ranks as one of this year’s worst, and for Pacino too. Without the stars, this is a throw away cop film that would’ve been sent straight to Blockbuster. All of my hype was for not, as the film is boring and predictable. I guessed who the ‘cop serial killer’ was from the trailer. Yawn.