Hey all. Capone in Chicago here.

If you grew up in the '70s or '80s or maybe even the early '90s, and were a massive movie fan, the dream was to see Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in a movie together — the Godfather early model and the Godfather late model. Seeing them sit face to face in Heat was a great start, but it didn't really drive away the urge to see these guys really chew up the scenery together. Thirteen years after HEAT, the two are thrust together in a very different kind of film, a lesser film, but by no means a terrible one. As directed by Jon Avnet, the man who proved that Pacino could humiliate himself just a little more than we once thought in 88 MINUTES, RIGHTEOUS KILL has an absolutely stellar cast working from a solidly average script by Russell Gewirtz (INSIDE MAN) and still finding ways to breathe a little life into it.

De Niro and Pacino play detectives who are on the trail of a serial killer who seems to be targeting criminals who somehow beat the system by getting off on a technicality or otherwise slip through the cracks in the law. Most of the victims are men who the world would definitely be better off without, and it just so happens that they were all involved in cases investigated by these two officers. It's easy to deduce from the film that the victims know their attacker, and that the attacker knows his victims' movements and patterns quite well. The killer also leaves a customized poem for each dead man. It doesn't take long for those investigating to determine that there's a good chance the murderer is a cop.

Without giving too much away, I figured out the film's big "twist" about halfway through without really understanding why this was the twist. It's impossible to know the why because we simply aren't given enough information. But here are some things to think about. Beginning early on the movie and revisited as the plot unfolds, we see highlights of what appears to be a videotaped confession by one of the main characters, so already I'm suspicious. Second, we actually see a couple of the murders take place, but we don't see the face of the killer. Now ask yourself, if we supposedly know the killer's identity from the videotape, why aren't they showing us the killer's face during the commission of the crimes? Movies do this all the time, but it's done so often in RIGHTEOUS KILL that it's distracting.

The supporting cast here is terrific, from John Leguizamo and current New Kid Donnie Wahlberg as younger detectives co-investigating the serial killer murders with their elder brethren; Brian Dennehy as the police captain (one of the more cliché parts in the film); Carla Gugino as De Niro's forensic expert girlfriend, who likes it rough in bed; and Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson as a club owner/drug dealer. I was especially impressed with Gugino turn as the brains and body of this movie. She plays the only one character outside of Pacino and De Niro who seems somewhat fleshed out (so to speak), and I'm not sure that's because of the script. She just knows how to play the smart and sexually forward professional extremely well.

In the end, RIGHTEOUS KILL feels incredibly overblown and puffed up well beyond its modest seams. Both leads are given ample opportunities to show us prime examples of the kind of perfectly drawn performances that have made them legends; they're also given way too much leeway by Avnet to go well past the point of believability or subtlety; believe it or not, there was a time when both of these actors knew how to be subtle, and there are times in this movie where they remind us of that. But more often than not, this film is about fully loaded emotions, screaming, near violence, and overacting (and that's just the scenes between the cop characters). In other words, it ranks the highest on the Ham-O-Meter for 2008. It's kind of scary to think that 50 Cent turns in the film's most subtle performance. Still, keeping all of that firmly in the front of my mind, I still like seeing these great method men do their thing. As I and millions of others have always known, they play well together. Hell, there's hardly a scene in this movie that they aren't both in. If the film works at all, it works despite a whole lot of mistakes and missteps on the part of the screenwriter and the director. The actors save the day, and isn't that a fact that lets us all sleep easier at night?

-- Capone
capone@aintitcoolmail.com