Righteous Kill was written by Russell Gewirtz, the same guy who wrote Inside Man. Like the earlier movie, this serial killer thriller and rabidly macho buddy cop caper bristles with conflicted ambitions toward making something that’s both smart and base, a genre work for the sleaze hungry and the beard-strokers alike. It’s a tough gambit, especially without a director of Spike Lee’s shrewd audacity and style to help pull it off, but I’m actually impressed how relatively well it works, even if it all inevitably evaporates under the heat of its own sketchy conceit.
From the start we’re encouraged to see verge-of-retirement hard-ass homicide detectives Cowan (Robert De Niro) and Fisk (Al Pacino) as platonic lovers of unyielding fidelity. They literally shoot their loads side by each at the firing range, cheer each other on during cop baseball games, sing each other’s praises to anyone who’ll listen, even parrot each other’s deflective one-liners when separately grilled by the NYPD shrink. When early on the corny looking faux-CCTV video footage of Cowan confessing to going on an extended vigilante killing spree begins its piecemeal interjections into the drama proper we know that these old pals will follow each other to the precipice of destruction. It’s only a question of whether one will follow the other right over the edge.
The economy of characters in Gewirtz’s script is itself a source of dynamicism, keeping his leads surrounded by numerous closely-watching potential adversaries nearly all of the time: the younger detectives Riley (Donnie Wahlberg) and Perez (John Leguizamo), who begin to suspect that the “poetry killer” of various local scumbags must be a cop; the amiable but stern Lieutenant Hingus (Brain Dennehy, a highly welcome face, and one that’s aged into an uncannily resemblance to Milan Kundera), who has a good poker face but seems all too aware he’s got a loose cannon on his hands; and crime scene investigator Karen (Carla Gugino, a highly welcome everything), a girl who likes her sex extremely rough and is currently being obliged by Cowan, their proximity giving her access to his private life if not quite his inner life.
Director Jon Avnet, whose long resume includes jobs as, um, diverse as Fried Green Tomatoes and 88 Minutes, gets down to the grunt work from the get-go, keeping the camera whizzing around and the cuts a-flying like Tony Scott on auto-pilot. He’s hardly the most sensitive filmmaker, but he keeps things moving—whether they want to move or not. With this fidgety style, he can’t quite perform the subtle slight-of-hand Gewirtz’s script is crying out for, and to be fair I’m not sure anyone could. The big reversal is telegraphed pretty far in advance and once you catch on to what’s really happening in Righteous Kill you may or may not want to bother sticking with it—the movie slowly becomes about the clever reversal itself instead of the meatier themes of loyalty and justice it lays claims to.
More disappointing for me is the neglect of the Karen character. The most interesting thing in The Score was Robert De Niro’s girlfriend, played by the sorrowfully underused Angela Bassett. Likewise, the most interesting thing in Righteous Kill is easily De Niro’s relationship with Gugino, an enormously delicate negotiation of trust, sex and maybe, just maybe, love, or something like it. Gugino brings tremendous texture, sass and dignity to a character that, far from being a conventional love interest, could have been difficult or impossible for the audience to identify with. This being De Niro’s movie, it’s just as important that her character has the potential to tell us a lot about Cowan. It’s a shame then that her Karen gets more or less brushed aside as the film hurtles toward its big, sloppy, scenery-chewing climax.
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