Word: pacino
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...early '70s the two have dominated dramatic acting in films; when Brando abdicated, they seized the crown. Just the pictures De Niro made with Martin Scorsese would constitute a dream career for any almost other performer: Mean Streets in 1973, then Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas. Same with Pacino's "S" movies: Serpico and Scarecrow in '73, followed by Scarface, Sea of Love, Scent of a Woman. De Niro and Pacino played father and son in The Godfather Part II but never shared a scene. In the 1995 Heat they spent nearly three hours in the same movie - with...
...clichés accruing around the cop genre (where the killer is always a cop), and more to do with the passing of time. Director Jon Avnet - who's done some decent work (The War) but was also responsible for this year's lamentable 88 Minutes, also starring Pacino - gives the new movie the grimy New York look and a generic intensity. Yet this is a film that missed its moment. Instead of the meeting of maestros at the top of their form, Righteous Kill has the feeling of Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds facing off for the first time...
...this film we are shown a grainy video of Turk (De Niro), who says he's been a cop for more than 30 years, "and in that time I have killed 14 people." The rest of the movie spells out his complicity and that of his partner Rooster (Pacino...
...Niro is 65, Pacino 68. (Brian Dennehy, who plays their precinct captain, is 70.) Isn't there a mandatory retirement age for cops? And, in New York, don't a lot of them take full-pay retirement after 20 years? Rooster describes retirement as "death with benefits." His work is his life, and he won't give either of them up. But a movie demands a little verisimilitude. Impolitic as it might be to make this observation, it's also unavoidable when talking about a movie like Righteous Kill: the camera is a remorseless appraiser of advancing...
...body. The scowl that was the actor's early trademark has settled into a thin lip-line of resignation; no catastrophe laid on Turk can surprise or disappoint him. Maybe De Niro has kept his physical instrument in shape all these years by husbanding his gestures. But Pacino has been a perpetual motion machine. In this movie he still is: dancing like a boxer, chewing gum, his feet banging out a nervous paradiddle. Eventually, gravity takes its revenge. In remorseless closeup, and beneath his strangely youthful hairdo, he reveals the forehead furrows, a murder of crowlines, bags like backpacks under...