Righteous Kill

Righteous Kill

Directed by Jon Avnet

(R)

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Robert De Niro and Al Pacino—together

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino sharing the screen should make any movie worth watching, said Neely Tucker in The Washington Post. It doesn’t. Righteous Kill, a crime puzzler about two cops pursuing a serial killer, banks on the novelty of seeing the two tough guys together. They’ve actually squared off once before, in Michael Mann’s 1995 Heat, but that was only an anticlimactic meeting at the film’s end. Here De Niro, 65, and Pacino, 68, deliver “just enough firepower to make the projector flicker along in B-movie fashion.” Having lost most of their youthful intensity, the performers muster enough for a “serviceable” buddy-cop movie. It’s “hard to know who deserves most of the blame for this star-struck” mush, said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Director Jon Avnet merely keeps things moving. But these actors need “visionary authority to put them in their best light.” These two should have worked together much earlier in their careers, said Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times. Twenty-five years ago, “this could have been the cinematic pairing of the year.”