If you saw both versions of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” side by side, you could spot the differences between the 2009 Swedish original and the 2011 American remake. Nevertheless, the revelations in the other won’t be as surprising. “Fight Club” director David Fincher brings his obsession with serial killers with him to this top-drawer adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s international bestseller. Fincher scored his first major cinematic success with the Brad Pitt & Morgan Freeman crime mystery “Se7en” (1995) about a cunning serial killer, and he explored similar subject matter in “Zodiac” (2007) a film about the real-life murders in San Francisco which spawned Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” franchise. Considering that the gritty subject matter of Larsson’s novel concerns a man who rapes and then murders women, the pairing of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (**** out of ****) and Fincher seems ideal. Oscar winning “Schindler's List” scenarist Steven Zaillian, who received Oscar nods for “Awakenings” as well as “Gangs of New York,” brings his formidable skills to bear as the sole scribe. Indeed, little is amiss in the Fincher & Zaillian retread, except cat lovers probably won’t appreciate the headless feline that winds up on our hero’s door step. The cat was conspicuous by its absence in the Swedish version. Perhaps the biggest difference between the two films is the casting of Lisbeth Salander. Noomi Rapace registered brilliantly as the eponymous heroine in the original, but newcomer Rooney Mara is no slouch. Mara wears insanity as persuasively as her black, boot-polish Goth make-up and her punk rock coiffures. Any preference you have may boil down to your choice between either Ms. Rapace or Ms. Mara. Each deliver chilling performances, and the Lisbeth Salander character qualifies as a biggest milestone in the depiction of women in film since the female assassin in the 1990 French action yarn “La Femme Nikita.”
Aging Swedish business magnate Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer of “The Sound of Music”) fears that he has few years left. The mysterious disappearance of his niece Harriet is the one thing which has haunted him for 4o years. She vanished without a trace one day at a family reunion. Neither the authorities nor Henrik were ever able to find her. To add insult to injury, Henrik has received a framed picture of a flower annually on each birthday. Harriet gave him the first flower, but lately Henrik suspects that all subsequent flowers since she disappeared have been sent by Harriet’s killer. Henrik feels like he is being ridiculed and he has suffered from this torment long enough. He hires an illustrious Swedish political journalist who writes for the magazine “Millennium.” A reluctant Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig of “Casino Royale”) accepts Vanger’s job offer since he has just lost a highly publicized libel suit against a notorious Swedish billionaire investment banker, Hans-Erik Wennerström (Ulf Friberg of “Exit”), and the court settlement has wiped out his savings.
Henrik commissions Blomkvist to write his memoirs in part because he abhors the corrupt Wennerström. Moreover, he possesses files on Wennerström which will damage the billionaire’s reputation and he promises to give them to Blomkvist after he completes his assignment. What Blomkvist doesn’t know is that Henrik’s attorney, Dirch Frode (Steven Berkoff of “Octopussy”), has employed Milton Security to conduct a background check on Blomkvist. The individual who does the background check is a 23-year old girl, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara of “Youth in Revolt”), and she leaves no stone unturned in her thorough investigation. Once Henrik hires Blomkvist, he explains that his family is pretty hideous bunch. Two of his brothers joined the Nazi Party in Sweden during World War II. Some don’t talk to each other even though they live in houses on an island linked to the mainland by a single bridge. Furthermore, Henrik suspects that one of them may have murdered poor Harriet. Henrik installs Blomkvist in a nearby cottage and provides him with every shred of evidence that the police relied on during their investigation of Harriet’s disappearance.
Later, things go awry when Henrik suffers a heart attack, and everybody but Frode expects him to die. At the hospital, some of Henrik’s relatives demand that Blomkvist be dismissed, but Martin Vanger (Stellan Skarsgård of “Thor”) convinces the family to allow Blomkvist to complete Henrik’s chronicle. Meantime, Lisbeth encounters her own woes when her guardian suffers a stroke, and the state replaces him. Lisbeth, it seems, has a life filled with tragedy. We learn that she burned her abusive father over eighty per cent of his body because he beat her mother without mercy. Since her assault on her father, Lisbeth has been in trouble and is now a ward of the state. The state transfers Lisbeth over to the villainous Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen of “Soul Assassin”)who shows little sympathy to Lisbeth. He humiliates her with questions about her private life. Basically, they get off on the wrong foot, but Lisbeth manages to bring the evil Bjurman around to her way of thinking as suffering abuse at his hands. These scenes are the reason that "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" carries an R-rating for explicit sexuality.
Eventually, Blomkvist finds the mystery so overwhelming that he asks Frode for an assistant and Frode recommends Lisbeth. Together, they struggle to not only find clues but also to interpret those clues correctly. While Blomkvist interviews the Vanger family, Lisbeth performs the leg work. She turns out to be a genuis with computers, brazenly hacking into anybody's account to obtain information.
If anything differentiates the two films, the casting disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist does. Stockholm born actor Michael Nyqvist appears more believable in the original, but English born actor Daniel Craig holds his own in the remake. Actually, were it not for radical, off-beat character of Lisbeth, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” would amount to little more than a complex European whodunit set in a scenic, snow-swept wonderland. In fact, it is Lisbeth who gives the film its lurid but gripping quality. She assumes a role of greater significance in the Swedish sequels and probably will in the American sequels. She emerges as a female Rambo with a no-nonsense attitude. If she were a cat, she would claw more often than purr. Although “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” clocks in at a lengthy 158 minutes, director David Fincher doesn’t squander a second. He knows the right moment to cut away from one scene to another to heighten suspense. Furthermore, despite the graphic crime scene photos and the misogyny, Fincher is careful enough to never rub our noses in it.
CINEMATIC REVELATIONS allows me the luxury of writing, editing and archiving my film and television reviews. Some reviews appeared initially in "The Commercial Dispatch" and "The Planet Weekly" and then later in the comment archives at the Internet Movie Database. IMDB.COM, however, imposes a limit on both the number of words and the number of times that an author may revise their comments. I hope that anybody who peruses these expanded reviews will find them useful.
Showing posts with label Serial killers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Serial killers. Show all posts
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Film Review of "I Know What You Did Last Summer" (1997)
A quartet of teenagers in “I Know What You Did Last Summer” (*** out of ****) go for a joyride after dark on July fourth, accidentally hit a pedestrian, and then try to cover up their crime. This refreshingly well-written but grisly thriller about a sadistic slayer, the hapless teen victims, and a bloody fishhook has more going for it than you might expect. The success of “Scream” has whetted the appetites of both moviemakers and audiences for more entries in the teen slasher genre. Happily, “I Know” provides all the usual thrills and chills of “Scream,” but bristles with better plot twists, more calculating characters, a dynamic villain, and a slam-bang finale in the tradition of Brian De Palma’s “Carrie.” Unhappily, first-time feature film director Jim Gillespie suppresses the more literate points in Kevin Williamson’s inventive, psychological script to promote the more commercial elements of guts, gore, and gruesomeness.
Set in a cozy North Carolina fishing hamlet, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” chronicles the exploits of Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt), Helen Shivers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Barry William Cox (Ryan Phillippe) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) on a final summer fling before they either leave for college or get real jobs. Leggy, good-looking Helen wins a local beauty pageant, and the teens party hardy on a lonely stretch of beach with the surf crashing in the background. When they aren’t concocting campfire tales about a crafty killer, they’re doing dirty deeds in the dunes. Binge-drinking Barry gets too sloshed to drive his shiny new BMW so tee-totalling Ray takes the wheel. On the way home, Barry’s berserk drinking antics distract Ray. Suddenly, before Ray can swerve, a man steps in front of the headlights. Smashing into the guy, the car careens to a halt, and the teens find his bloody body in a ditch. Too freaked out to verify his death or alert the authorities, our protagonists argue briefly before they deposit the body in the briny deep. They hope for the best, but their efforts only yield the worst.
Julie, Helen, Barry, and Ray make a pact: they will carry their secret to the grave. Little do they realize how appropriately deadly such a vow turns out for them. Gradually, these best friends grow apart. A year after the incident, Julie suffers the most trauma from the collision. Reluctantly, she comes home for the summer and receives the shock of her life. An anonymous letter addressed to her contains the simple but devastating message: “I know what you did last summer.” Guilt grips her like an icy cold fist. Julie wants to call the police despite the consequences. Instead, she allows herself to be argued down, and she fears now that her life may be the price of her silence. Scary things start to happen. Helen, who treasured her long blonde hair, awakens one morning to find her golden tresses shorn and a threat scrawled in lipstick on her bedroom mirror. The cocksure Barry loses his football letter jacket, and the killer runs Barry’s automobile down into the jock’s own house. Finally, Julie discovers a body packed in the trunk of her car. Barry suspects that Ray is the villain.
Meanwhile, the clear-minded Julie tries to identify the guy they hit. Helen and Julie take a trip into the sticks. They visit Melissa Egan (Anne Heche of “Donny Brasco”) who lives alone and spends most of her day carving up dead farm animals. According to newspaper reports, the body of Melissa’s brother washed up not long after the hit and run, but the police attribute the boy’s death to drowning. Our heroines want to find out if Melissa’s brother might have had a vigilante for a friend. Once again the incriminating finger points at Ray. If “I Know” appears to imitate “Scream,” scenarist Kevin Williamson receives both the blame and the credit. After all, he wrote both movies. He has as much fun here bashing those eerie old campfire tales as he had busting slasher movies in “Scream.” The film opens with a legitimate, real-life predicament before it degenerates into an adrenalin gouge-and-gut thriller. These teens worry more about contacting the authorities than they do about disposing of a body. Not only has Williamson penned a tense, entertaining script, he has also pressed a few politically correct buttons. The movie suggests that only the worst things can happen when teens drink and drive. The peer pressure that teenagers endure is rampant, and they must take responsibility for their actions. Director Gillespie pushes most of these worthwhile didactic themes into the shadows.
The “I Know Who You Killed Last Summer” villain dresses in high sinister fashion as a fisherman. Attired in an oilskin slicker, rubber boots, and a southwester, he looks like a duster-clad cowboy from a spaghetti western crossed with “Star War” villain Darth Vader. The chilling quality of the masquerade is that we never see whose face lurks behind the disguise, and we never hear his voice. The huge diabolical fishhook that our fiend brandishes makes lugging corpses around on its curved, wicked point look relatively easy. Williamson has created an original killer with a theatrical sense of style. Many slasher movie villains have their own musical theme that announces their presence. The “I Know” villain fiddles with one of his villain’s trinkets. The distinctive sound that it produces not only serves as the killer’s leitmotif, but also apprises us of the fiend’s presence.
Little can be said about the rest of the story without blowing its impact. Gillespie and Williamson save the big revelation near the end, and it’s something that you’ll never guess. Meanwhile, Gillespie deploys all those staple slasher movie subterfuges to distract audiences from figuring out the story ahead of time. Although the murders show moderate amounts of blood, the filmmakers want to shock rather than sicken. Gillespie stages each death with dramatic emphasis as well as a little irony. Disemboweled body parts are for the most part left off-screen to enliven the imagination. One character nearly reaches safety before the fisherman eviscerates her in an alley not more than movie subterfuges to distract audiences from figuring out the story ahead of time. Although the murders show moderate amounts of blood, the filmmakers want to shock rather than sicken. Gillespie stages each death with dramatic emphasis as well as a little irony. Disemboweled body parts are for the most part left off-screen to enliven the imagination. One character nearly reaches safety before the fisherman eviscerates her in an alley not more than ten feet from a marching band parading down the street.
A cast of unknowns credibly acquits itself. Hewitt brings a richly textured vulnerability to Julie. Caught between doing what is right and what her teenage friends think is right creates a painful dilemma for her that everybody has confronted. As much as Julie wants to believe that going to the police was the appropriate thing to do, she realizes that the smart thing now is to kill their killer before they die. As Helen, Gellar (looking a lot like Mira Sorvino) plays a wiser-than-average bimbo. The rivalry between Helen and her sister Elsa is one of the film’s neater nuances. Phillippe vividly captures the snobbish attitude of his star football character Barry who refuses to let anybody intimidate him, while Prinze as Ray is the least interesting but more heroic of the foursome. As Benjamin Willis, Muse Watson of “Sommersby” never needs worry about being cast as a hard-bitten character in future movies.
“I Know What You Did Last Summer’ generates more than enough action, suspense and horror. Credit goes to British lenser Denis Crossman. His dark, haunting photography, and the placement of his cameras enhance the horror. John Debney’s electrifying music score whips up just the right amount of frenzy to put you on the edge of your seat for the jolt and volts that Gillespie conjures up. This is the kind of movie where the women in the audience will scream because things jump out from nowhere to frighten them.
Minor problems afflict the film. Some dialogue gets drowned out by the music and the sound effects. The red herring subplot involving a pathetic looking backwoods girl seems incredibly preposterous. The fisherman villain may be the cleanest stalker in film history. Nobody can ever tell where he has struck, and the victims are literally kept on ice.
If you enjoy good scary movies, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” surpasses even the classic slashes, so you should not be disappointed. Enough surprises occur in the story to keep you guessing when you aren’t feeling paranoid. The evil fisherman is destined to take a place in the pantheon of movie murderers. Expect fisherman costumes to appear in the next year’s Halloween sales. Homicide has acquired a fresh look! In the tradition of “Friday the 13th,” “Halloween,” and the “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies, “I Know What You Did Last summer” unleashes a shocker ending that paves the way for an inevitable sequel.
Set in a cozy North Carolina fishing hamlet, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” chronicles the exploits of Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt), Helen Shivers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Barry William Cox (Ryan Phillippe) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) on a final summer fling before they either leave for college or get real jobs. Leggy, good-looking Helen wins a local beauty pageant, and the teens party hardy on a lonely stretch of beach with the surf crashing in the background. When they aren’t concocting campfire tales about a crafty killer, they’re doing dirty deeds in the dunes. Binge-drinking Barry gets too sloshed to drive his shiny new BMW so tee-totalling Ray takes the wheel. On the way home, Barry’s berserk drinking antics distract Ray. Suddenly, before Ray can swerve, a man steps in front of the headlights. Smashing into the guy, the car careens to a halt, and the teens find his bloody body in a ditch. Too freaked out to verify his death or alert the authorities, our protagonists argue briefly before they deposit the body in the briny deep. They hope for the best, but their efforts only yield the worst.
Julie, Helen, Barry, and Ray make a pact: they will carry their secret to the grave. Little do they realize how appropriately deadly such a vow turns out for them. Gradually, these best friends grow apart. A year after the incident, Julie suffers the most trauma from the collision. Reluctantly, she comes home for the summer and receives the shock of her life. An anonymous letter addressed to her contains the simple but devastating message: “I know what you did last summer.” Guilt grips her like an icy cold fist. Julie wants to call the police despite the consequences. Instead, she allows herself to be argued down, and she fears now that her life may be the price of her silence. Scary things start to happen. Helen, who treasured her long blonde hair, awakens one morning to find her golden tresses shorn and a threat scrawled in lipstick on her bedroom mirror. The cocksure Barry loses his football letter jacket, and the killer runs Barry’s automobile down into the jock’s own house. Finally, Julie discovers a body packed in the trunk of her car. Barry suspects that Ray is the villain.
Meanwhile, the clear-minded Julie tries to identify the guy they hit. Helen and Julie take a trip into the sticks. They visit Melissa Egan (Anne Heche of “Donny Brasco”) who lives alone and spends most of her day carving up dead farm animals. According to newspaper reports, the body of Melissa’s brother washed up not long after the hit and run, but the police attribute the boy’s death to drowning. Our heroines want to find out if Melissa’s brother might have had a vigilante for a friend. Once again the incriminating finger points at Ray. If “I Know” appears to imitate “Scream,” scenarist Kevin Williamson receives both the blame and the credit. After all, he wrote both movies. He has as much fun here bashing those eerie old campfire tales as he had busting slasher movies in “Scream.” The film opens with a legitimate, real-life predicament before it degenerates into an adrenalin gouge-and-gut thriller. These teens worry more about contacting the authorities than they do about disposing of a body. Not only has Williamson penned a tense, entertaining script, he has also pressed a few politically correct buttons. The movie suggests that only the worst things can happen when teens drink and drive. The peer pressure that teenagers endure is rampant, and they must take responsibility for their actions. Director Gillespie pushes most of these worthwhile didactic themes into the shadows.
The “I Know Who You Killed Last Summer” villain dresses in high sinister fashion as a fisherman. Attired in an oilskin slicker, rubber boots, and a southwester, he looks like a duster-clad cowboy from a spaghetti western crossed with “Star War” villain Darth Vader. The chilling quality of the masquerade is that we never see whose face lurks behind the disguise, and we never hear his voice. The huge diabolical fishhook that our fiend brandishes makes lugging corpses around on its curved, wicked point look relatively easy. Williamson has created an original killer with a theatrical sense of style. Many slasher movie villains have their own musical theme that announces their presence. The “I Know” villain fiddles with one of his villain’s trinkets. The distinctive sound that it produces not only serves as the killer’s leitmotif, but also apprises us of the fiend’s presence.
Little can be said about the rest of the story without blowing its impact. Gillespie and Williamson save the big revelation near the end, and it’s something that you’ll never guess. Meanwhile, Gillespie deploys all those staple slasher movie subterfuges to distract audiences from figuring out the story ahead of time. Although the murders show moderate amounts of blood, the filmmakers want to shock rather than sicken. Gillespie stages each death with dramatic emphasis as well as a little irony. Disemboweled body parts are for the most part left off-screen to enliven the imagination. One character nearly reaches safety before the fisherman eviscerates her in an alley not more than movie subterfuges to distract audiences from figuring out the story ahead of time. Although the murders show moderate amounts of blood, the filmmakers want to shock rather than sicken. Gillespie stages each death with dramatic emphasis as well as a little irony. Disemboweled body parts are for the most part left off-screen to enliven the imagination. One character nearly reaches safety before the fisherman eviscerates her in an alley not more than ten feet from a marching band parading down the street.
A cast of unknowns credibly acquits itself. Hewitt brings a richly textured vulnerability to Julie. Caught between doing what is right and what her teenage friends think is right creates a painful dilemma for her that everybody has confronted. As much as Julie wants to believe that going to the police was the appropriate thing to do, she realizes that the smart thing now is to kill their killer before they die. As Helen, Gellar (looking a lot like Mira Sorvino) plays a wiser-than-average bimbo. The rivalry between Helen and her sister Elsa is one of the film’s neater nuances. Phillippe vividly captures the snobbish attitude of his star football character Barry who refuses to let anybody intimidate him, while Prinze as Ray is the least interesting but more heroic of the foursome. As Benjamin Willis, Muse Watson of “Sommersby” never needs worry about being cast as a hard-bitten character in future movies.
“I Know What You Did Last Summer’ generates more than enough action, suspense and horror. Credit goes to British lenser Denis Crossman. His dark, haunting photography, and the placement of his cameras enhance the horror. John Debney’s electrifying music score whips up just the right amount of frenzy to put you on the edge of your seat for the jolt and volts that Gillespie conjures up. This is the kind of movie where the women in the audience will scream because things jump out from nowhere to frighten them.
Minor problems afflict the film. Some dialogue gets drowned out by the music and the sound effects. The red herring subplot involving a pathetic looking backwoods girl seems incredibly preposterous. The fisherman villain may be the cleanest stalker in film history. Nobody can ever tell where he has struck, and the victims are literally kept on ice.
If you enjoy good scary movies, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” surpasses even the classic slashes, so you should not be disappointed. Enough surprises occur in the story to keep you guessing when you aren’t feeling paranoid. The evil fisherman is destined to take a place in the pantheon of movie murderers. Expect fisherman costumes to appear in the next year’s Halloween sales. Homicide has acquired a fresh look! In the tradition of “Friday the 13th,” “Halloween,” and the “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies, “I Know What You Did Last summer” unleashes a shocker ending that paves the way for an inevitable sequel.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
FILM REVIEW OF ''RIGHTEOUS KILL''
"Fried Green Tomatoes" director Jon Avnet's new movie "Righteous Kill" qualifies as far from righteous. This gritty whodunit about corrupt cops with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino suffers from quite possibly the worst screenplay in film history. Some of Jean-Claude Van Damme's straight-to-video martial arts thrillers surpass this nonsense. "Inside Man" scenarist Russell Gewirtz gets it all wrong. Gewirtz takes the "Dirty Harry" sequel "Magnum Force" and rewrites it as an Agatha Christie mystery for tough guys. Indeed, sixty-five year old Robert De Niro quotes "Dirty Harry" at an Internal Affairs hearing when he observes, "Nothing wrong with a little shooting, as long as the right people get shot." Clearly, De Niro and Pacino made this clunker with its sloppy, incoherent, convoluted, unbelievable script for the bucks. "Righteous Kill" lacks excitement, suspense, and creativity. The eleventh hour revelation of the killer is so incredibly contrived that you wonder how they could have foisted this pathetic potboiler onto movie audiences. Everybody who buys a ticket to watch this tawdry tedium is expecting something as good as--if not better than--the two previous De Niro & Pacino pictures. Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather, Part 2" won a Best Picture Oscar in 1975, while "Miami Vice" creator Michael Mann's urban crime thriller "Heat" ranks as one of the great law & order epics. Righteous Kill" is, simply put, righteously ill in its criminal abuse of a stellar cast including Carla Gugino, Brian Dennehy, 50 Cent, John Leguizamo, Barry Primus, and Donnie Wahlberg, not to mention the hour and forty minutes that you'll waste watching it.
"Righteous Kill" involves vigilante justice. Several unsavory citizens die in this R-rated opus. A serial killer guns down a black drug dealer (Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson), a white rapist (Terry Serpico), a child killer (Frank John Hughes), a pedophile Catholic priest (Malachy McCourt) , a pimp, and a Russian wrestler (Oleg Taktarov) in cold-blood. The same killer leaves a poem on a card at each homicide. Talk about poetic justice! Homicide Detectives Thomas Cowan (Robert De Niro) and David Fisk (Al Pacino) have been partners for 30 years in the New York Police Department. An Internal Affairs investigator comments that Cowan & Fisk are closer than Lennon & McCartney. These two profane, sharp-shooting, tough-talking veterans have witnessed the seamy side of life and eventually it affects their mindset. Cowan and Fisk had to stand by helplessly while the courts cleared a child killer from a crime that he committed. A self-righteous Cowan plants evidence that convicts the child killer of another crime to put him behind bars. Cowan behaves like "Dirty Harry" and his partner Fisk describes him aptly as "a pit-bull on crack." Initially, Cowan and Fisk have no luck catching the serial killer and Detectives Simon Perez (John Leguizamo of "The Rock") and Ted Riley (Donnie Wahlberg of "Saw 2") join their investigation when one of their cases coincides with our heroes. Cowan and Perez hate each other because they have been bedding down a nymphomaniacal Crime Scene forensics expert, Karen Corelli (Carla Gugino of "American Gangster"), who loves rough sex. No matter what they do to solve the case, they cannot crack it, until Fisk suggests that the killer is a cop. Cowan suspects a disgruntled cop busted off the force has the motive. Meanwhile, the feud between Perez and Cowan fuels Perez's belief that Cowan is the murderer. Cowan admits he knew the priest and Lieutenant Hingis (a shrunken looking Brian Dennehy of "Silverado") puts him on a desk and allows the younger detectives to engineer a sting that will expose Cowan. Cowan's partner Fisk laughs in Hingis' face as well at Perez and Fisk.
Things begin to fall into place when one victim, the Russian, survives the killer's three bullets and the N.Y.P.D. guards his hospital room. The best mysteries give audiences the chance to figure them out. "Righteous Kill" deprives us crucial background material that would have made it far easier to fathom the killer's identity. Instead, Gewirtz and Avnet treat us to scenes where our heroes rarely get into any dangerous predicaments. Avnet stages a clumsy shoot out in an African-American nightspot, but every time somebody dies in "Righteous Kill" the crime is shown from the killer's perspective. Repeatedly, what you don't see and what you're not told about the protagonists keeps you in the dark. For example, we know De Niro and Pacino's characters only by their nicknames. The filmmakers refuse to establish the identities of either De Niro or Pacino from the start. The criminal investigation takes weird turns and red herrings—things designed to distract us—appear everywhere. Actually, the best clue to the killer's identity is broached early in the action, but you won't pay any attention to it because it seems to have little relevance.
Television series like CBS-TV's three "C.S.I." shows make this big-budget Hollywood whodunit look sophomoric. At one point, Lt. Hingis asks our heroes if they want to retire because they aren't making any headway. Neither Cowan nor Fisk are prepared to back down from this challenge, even if it means disaster for them. In that moment, De Niro and Pacino behave like 'Grumpy Old Cops' out to solve one last crime. Watching "Righteous Kill" will give you a bad case of the N.Y.P.D. Blues.
"Righteous Kill" involves vigilante justice. Several unsavory citizens die in this R-rated opus. A serial killer guns down a black drug dealer (Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson), a white rapist (Terry Serpico), a child killer (Frank John Hughes), a pedophile Catholic priest (Malachy McCourt) , a pimp, and a Russian wrestler (Oleg Taktarov) in cold-blood. The same killer leaves a poem on a card at each homicide. Talk about poetic justice! Homicide Detectives Thomas Cowan (Robert De Niro) and David Fisk (Al Pacino) have been partners for 30 years in the New York Police Department. An Internal Affairs investigator comments that Cowan & Fisk are closer than Lennon & McCartney. These two profane, sharp-shooting, tough-talking veterans have witnessed the seamy side of life and eventually it affects their mindset. Cowan and Fisk had to stand by helplessly while the courts cleared a child killer from a crime that he committed. A self-righteous Cowan plants evidence that convicts the child killer of another crime to put him behind bars. Cowan behaves like "Dirty Harry" and his partner Fisk describes him aptly as "a pit-bull on crack." Initially, Cowan and Fisk have no luck catching the serial killer and Detectives Simon Perez (John Leguizamo of "The Rock") and Ted Riley (Donnie Wahlberg of "Saw 2") join their investigation when one of their cases coincides with our heroes. Cowan and Perez hate each other because they have been bedding down a nymphomaniacal Crime Scene forensics expert, Karen Corelli (Carla Gugino of "American Gangster"), who loves rough sex. No matter what they do to solve the case, they cannot crack it, until Fisk suggests that the killer is a cop. Cowan suspects a disgruntled cop busted off the force has the motive. Meanwhile, the feud between Perez and Cowan fuels Perez's belief that Cowan is the murderer. Cowan admits he knew the priest and Lieutenant Hingis (a shrunken looking Brian Dennehy of "Silverado") puts him on a desk and allows the younger detectives to engineer a sting that will expose Cowan. Cowan's partner Fisk laughs in Hingis' face as well at Perez and Fisk.
Things begin to fall into place when one victim, the Russian, survives the killer's three bullets and the N.Y.P.D. guards his hospital room. The best mysteries give audiences the chance to figure them out. "Righteous Kill" deprives us crucial background material that would have made it far easier to fathom the killer's identity. Instead, Gewirtz and Avnet treat us to scenes where our heroes rarely get into any dangerous predicaments. Avnet stages a clumsy shoot out in an African-American nightspot, but every time somebody dies in "Righteous Kill" the crime is shown from the killer's perspective. Repeatedly, what you don't see and what you're not told about the protagonists keeps you in the dark. For example, we know De Niro and Pacino's characters only by their nicknames. The filmmakers refuse to establish the identities of either De Niro or Pacino from the start. The criminal investigation takes weird turns and red herrings—things designed to distract us—appear everywhere. Actually, the best clue to the killer's identity is broached early in the action, but you won't pay any attention to it because it seems to have little relevance.
Television series like CBS-TV's three "C.S.I." shows make this big-budget Hollywood whodunit look sophomoric. At one point, Lt. Hingis asks our heroes if they want to retire because they aren't making any headway. Neither Cowan nor Fisk are prepared to back down from this challenge, even if it means disaster for them. In that moment, De Niro and Pacino behave like 'Grumpy Old Cops' out to solve one last crime. Watching "Righteous Kill" will give you a bad case of the N.Y.P.D. Blues.
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