The waste of society needs to be eliminated, some may like to believe. Thus, like Kamal Haasan, a ‘righteous’ citizen who makes it his mission in life to knock off corrupt bureaucrats in a famous Tamil film, an NYPD cop in Righteous Kill is out to clean the streets off murderers and sexual perverts who have escaped the hands of the law.
Such kind of ruthless thoughts can be very dangerous. And when the lines are crossed and things get too blurred, it becomes a little difficult to distinguish the good from the bad.
Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, highly-decorated NYPD cops on the verge of retirement, are excellent in the portrayal of their respective characters. The duo seems to fit naturally into their roles, without getting into any histrionics. It almost appears as if they were handed a script on the day of the shoot and asked to simply behave as themselves.
Rap musician/actor/ex-jailbird, Curtis ‘50 Cent’ Jackson too puts up a nice act as a nightclub owner/cocaine pusher. But with DeNiro and Pacino around, he as well as all the other cops are all clearly overshadowed.
The writing has too many holes.
The killer always leaves a hand-written note at the scene of the crime. But no forensic action is taken with regard to this. Seriously, instead of racking brains and pointing fingers at each other, all that the detectives needed to do was to call in a handwriting expert and do a thorough analysis of the handful of cops in that precinct. Of course, had that been done there would have been no story to tell.
In a particular setting with three characters, one suddenly disappears simply because the script specifically required only the other two to be present for the immediate event to follow.
And one of the characters does something really awful, something that is not totally believable given their psychology. Apparently, the reason for them to do so is to enable the writer to flaunt their artistic ability and to thicken the plot. The story would have been more credible, instead, had a certain witness and his cop guardian been ruthlessly erased.
Had such silly scripting errors been taken care of, Jon Avnet’s NYPD crime thriller could maybe have been worth a watch. But I must say this: it’s half a thrill to see two of Hollywood’s greatest actors together again. What an awesome rapport! Wonder why no producer ever thought of making a series of tough guy movies with the duo.
