Righteous Kill

Dexter with a conscience and a reunion of old farts years later could have gone on to be another major entry in film history, but Gewirtz's script, without a single twist or any solid logic, was topped off by Avnet's incredibly routine direction. Avnet tells the story in a classic French style for a while, then goes into camera speed-ups and covers the whole thing by ripping off Mann's opus. It’s a cheap B crime film that should get a life sentence on the back shelf of the video store. (28.10.2008)

The basic plot structure is not so bad – at the beginning, it's really not clear who the killer actually is – but the clumsy cuts and mistakes in the script tarnish the rest of the film. And if the collaboration between De Niro and Pacino was supposed to be a tribute to Heat and a return of the famous tough guys, it did not succeed in either aspect. The final scene is like a copy-paste (the lighting, the sound), only instead of landing planes, we have passing trains. Perhaps not the biggest mistake, but by far the biggest flaw in my eyes. Furthermore, Pacino already shows too many wrinkles and De Niro doesn't “fuck” either, his detective is a rather uninteresting and flat character. Righteous Kill fits exactly where it was expected to, on the shelves of video rental stores. It's a B-movie with no renaissance. (10.10.2008)

I was a bit skeptical at first based on what I had heard, but after seeing the film, my fears are gone. De Niro and Pacino may not have made “HEAT 2“, but their performances made Righteous Kill into a very decent and chilling spectacle. It ran out of steam somewhere in the middle of the film, but the ending (was it really that predictable for everyone? It definitely wasn’t for me) made up for it all handsomely. Righteous Kill has an idea, a very interesting and, I think, quite realistic one, that I'm sure everyone has or will at some point think about. Be it a cop or the common man. (07.02.2010)

I'm absolutely certain that the creators of this film were trying to convey something truly important. However, they did it in such a heavy-handed way that the strangely kaleidoscopic plot essentially lost my interest. The only strong, emotionally charged impression I took away from the whole affair was how utterly enchanting Carla Gugino looked here. The movie was powerful in that regard, but I think its original goal was something completely different. I don't know what it was, I'm not going to go looking for it, and I'm a bit dismayed at how many talented actors it took to create something so lackluster. / Lesson learned (For fans of Carla Gugino): Beauty is worth a hundred minutes of suffering. (11.05.2022)