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I've discovered yet another occupation hazard in the high-stress, high-stakes, hos-and-Lear-jets lifestyle of the professional guy who sits in a theater for a couple hours a week and then tells everyone else what that experience was like. (This is how I think of myself. I finish, on average, two thoughts a day.)
I already got shoes so pop-sticky I can stand on your ceiling and watch you sleep. (What up, Eileen. You should check with your doctor about that deviated septum.) I already have to field questions from my friends and family about what they should see -- questions I have to answer for free! And you know what's really flicking me in the nose right now? I'm vaguely familiar with like everyone who's made a major movie in the last two years!
So what? So there I am a few weeks back, watching a trailer for Righteous Kill where it says it's directed by Jon Avnet, and I'm thinking "Hey, I've heard of that guy, he must be pretty good." And it turns out I am as wrong as your dad was about the correct way to raise you, because the place I'd heard of Avnet, the last movie he directed, was 88 Minutes, a thriller so ridiculous its creators should have gotten the Hollywood version of in-school suspension until at least 2010.
How's Avnet's latest? Well, it's got Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, so it can't be all bad. Pacino's a straight-laced cop; De Niro is his explosive partner. After a child-killer gets off free, De Niro, unable to watch the justice system fail any longer, starts going vigilante, killing thugs in the street and making it look like the work of a poem-writing serial killer.
Only the details don't add up. The cops on the case decide it must be a police officer committing the murders. Detective John Leguizamo, combing out the connections to all the victims, starts to suspect one of the men he's working with to solve the killings -- De Niro -- might be the very man pulling the trigger.
Let me put this as clearly as I possibly can: Righteous Kill is a fleetingly good movie trying hard to be a great movie and crippled by the ending of an awful movie.
It's a movie in a hurry. Deploying the same montage-like editing that made Scorsese's The Departed one of the most propulsive movies of all time, Avnet rams right into the story and trusts us to keep up with the constant cuts.
Done right, it's an incredible technique -- you get all kinds of information across in minimal time -- but keeping it under control is like steering a brakeless car with your feet while someone gives you a wet willy in both ears: you need to be a cinematic Shaolin master to maintain concentration or it's off into the ditch with you and all the other poor bastards along for the ride.
If Avnet doesn't crash, he spends a lot of time off on a rough shoulder. Hard to tell how much is him and how much is writer Russell Gewirtz, who finds time for fun tough-guy banter and a scattering of funny lines but doesn't provide the longer, character-heavy scenes that keep us grounded as the story bounds along. The result is something choppy and disconnected, ambitious and sometimes successful, glimpses of a talent that isn't quite there.
Actually, you know what, there is a big damn crash in Righteous Kill, and that's the ending. It's a 12-car pileup where they're still finding lost limbs three days later and on scene the paramedics are staging an impromptu contest as to who can barf the most surprising color.
Heaven forbid I spoil what's already rotten, but let's just say the finale is manipulative, nonsensical and dissatisfying. It may have worked if we had any true sense of who the characters involved are. Without that, what's meant to be a shocker carries no meaning at all.
Which is really a bummer, because Righteous Kill has the cast, dialogue, and style to have been interesting, if nothing else. When you shoot for the cheap thrill, you often hit even lower than you were aiming.
Grade: C
