Average Rating: 4.1/10
Reviews Counted: 139
Fresh: 26 | Rotten: 113
Al Pacino and Robert De Niro do their best to elevate this dowdy genre exercise, but even these two greats can't resuscitate the film's hackneyed script.
Average Rating: 3.8/10
Critic Reviews: 28
Fresh: 3 | Rotten: 25
Al Pacino and Robert De Niro do their best to elevate this dowdy genre exercise, but even these two greats can't resuscitate the film's hackneyed script.
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Average Rating: 3.1/5
User Ratings: 86,715
Jon Avnet's thriller Righteous Kill stars Al Pacino and Robert De Niro as a pair of Big Apple police officers investigating a series of murders committed by a serial killer. Carla Gugino co-stars as a crime-scene investigator who has romantic ties to De Niro. 50 Cent, Donnie Wahlberg, Brian Dennehy, and John Leguizamo co-star. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi
Sep 10, 2008 Wide
Jan 6, 2009
$40.0M
Overture Films
All Critics (143) | Top Critics (28) | Fresh (27) | Rotten (115) | DVD (7)
This thriller by Jon Avnet is mostly by the numbers, and its surprise ending, though effective, feels somewhat forced.
Nearly everything about this film is a cliché.
Say it ain't so, Bobby and Al.
There's nothing righteous to be found here.
The movie is hectic, exhausting, and baffling.
It's not much fun to see these two reduced to Mad TV parodies of themselves. In the right movie, they'd stop coasting on their legends long enough to remind us how they became them.
The worst about Righteous Kill is that there's probably a perfectly acceptable procedural thriller somewhere in the mountain of cliches and stupidity that riddle the film.
Imagine this conversation: A phone call between actor Bob De Niro and director Marty Scorsese. Bobby: Hello, Marty. I've been calling and texting, but you never answer. (Silence) Bobby: I'm talking to you. Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
An overly decorated pinata afraid to expose the vacuum inside.
Pacino. DeNiro. Armed and dangerous. In a cop drama. In NYC. Together. Written by the writer of Inside Man. Sounds great, doesn't it? Well, what could've gone so wrong?
Equally gritty old school crime thriller and flashy seductive post-modern whodunit noir, along with De Niro's off the job kinky rough sex lover forensic babe (Carla Gugino) who likes him to role play criminals in bed, Righteous Kill delivers the goods.
...the phrase phoning-it-in was practically invented for Pacino and De Niro's work here...
Russell Gewirtz's script is built around a trick, one that is simultaneously too clever by half and not clever at all (which itself is quite a trick).
There's nothing righteous about this tired and tiresome good cop/bad cop NYPD procedural from Avnet; in fact, it's pretty much an abomination from the get-go.
So somebody finally got De Niro and Pacino to co-star in a movie together and this is the best they could come up with?
A derivative and increasingly silly crime thriller.
Righteous Kill is an average police mystery/thriller, terribly disappointing considering the two acting giants who star in it. I always like Carla Guginio and John Lequizamo too, but they don't add much here. So, all these actors have done impressive work before, but director Jon Avnet doesn't get much done here. There
September 23, 2011
Super Reviewer
ok...a pair of seasoned cops, Turk (Robert De Niro) and Rooster (Al Pacino) are on the case when a serial killer with a vigillante streak starts bumping off bad guys in New York City.They team up with younger detectives Perez and Riley and assisted by crime scene specilist Karen Corelli they work to uncover the killers
March 17, 2011
Super Reviewer
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