Merrick here...


...with another look at RIGHTEOUS KILL, in response to reviews we posted yesterday (FIND THEM HERE!)

Could be sounding better, folks. Could be sounding better. But, again, keep in mind there's a while between now and the film's September release...so the movie might change a bit between now and then.

On a side note: it sounds like the bozos running this screening were total tools. This reviewer mentions how rude they were, as did one of the write-ups we ran yesterday. The folks running such screenings...their job isn't to offend their audience, or to intimidate those who don't follow some prescribed (or desired) party line. Their job is to show an audience a film & gather objective information to take back to marketing folks, studios, filmmakers, etc. Period.

So, I'm not sure what these particular reps were thinking. But...and this presumes our readers are being honest and accurate...what happened at this screening was way uncool, and bad news all around.

Here's Jersey Jedi with his thoughts on the film...and a dress down of the dude wrangling the subsequent focus group.

I just read the two Righteous Kill reviews on the site and I thought I would send in my thoughts too.

Starting with some background: I am clearly a Jersey boy 100%. I come from the kind of typical Italian-American family that pronounces every other word in a dialect straight out of the Calabrese country side. So, naturally, I have been brought up to worship Pacino and DeNiro as being slightly less holy that Jesus (you know those scenes in "Garden State" where everyone keeps referencing 'Jersey's DeNiro' because Zach Braff's character is an actor? - That's what I'm talking about). So when I received an invitation to see the first flick with both legends together since the definitive crime movie "Heat" (and the first where they directly play off each other for the duration of the picture), I could not have been more ecstatic. Pig in shit does not begin to describe the sensation.

Me and my girlfriend arrived nice and early, sat front row center and just raved about how amazing this was going to be. We were even asked by the guy running the thing to stay after and talk to the filmmakers. At 7:30, lights go down, temp score kicks in and DeNiro confesses to 14 murders while looking directly into camera.

My stomach dropped.

And not in a good way.

I knew going in that this was written Russell Gewirtz, who also wrote the spectacular "Inside Man". So I felt a deep sense of distress when I realized this was the same exact opening that was utilized in "Inside Man" (you know, when Clive Owen speaks directly into camera stating that his plan to pull of the perfect robbery worked... yea). And that fact completely defines what kind of a movie "Righteous Kill" is; It is a mash up of all the great conventions contained in modern crime films, but executed in the most haphazard, lazy and intellectually offensive way humanly possible.

In the aforementioned scene, DeNiro's character states that his name is David Fisk and proceedes to detail how he performed the murders, his paranoia concerning being caught and a million other perfectly timed statements that unconvincingly coincide to what's happening on screen. So when you find out after the entire length of the movie that Pacino's character was actually the one who committed all the murders (DeNiro was only reading from a pocket journal that Pacino wrote in - Pacino's character's name is actually Fisk, not DeNiro) it is not only unsurprising but downright enraging. This is disrespect for the audience's intelligence on a level that is staggering. If you thought the ending for "the Village" was contrived and incongruent with what came before, wait to you get a load of these shenanigans.

The thing is that if anyone else besides Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino were in this movie, it may have turned out to be a fun little distraction. I may have been able to ignore the hundreds of logistical missteps and just gone along for the ride.

But they are in this movie together. So I just can't.

If you are going to put Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino in a movie together as partners, it has to be great. That's it. I'm not saying that it has to be complete perfection and a revelation like "Godfather 2" and "Heat" were. But at the very least it should play to their strengths as the two greatest actors of their generation and give them something worth doing together. And this sure as hell isn't it. A little originality would have gone a long way. But, as it turns out, "Righteous Kill" is easily one of the biggest missteps in the entirety of both Pacino and DeNiro's career.

Such a fuckin shame.

Jersey Jedi

P.S. That guy (Andy was his name) that asked my girlfriend and I to attend the discussion after the movie - the same one that the previous reviewer called a 'jerk off'.

Well after the movie ended, and we've filled out our surveys, he comes over to us and asks us what we thought of the movie. So we show him that we kinda hated it (she gave it a 'fair' rating and I said 'poor'), he reads it out loud so everyone can hear it, and walks over to his assistant and states just as loudly that he's "not going to be using those two over there".

After that the assistant berated us, asking "How could you hate that movie!?". The only thing that saved me from total embarrassment was that a couple of guys above us chucked after he read our shitty reviews and seemed to feel the same way.

If this is how they treat loyal fans who are willing to give honest and heartfelt feedback, I have lost an incredible amount of disrespect for the Hollywood system.