Review of Righteous Kill (2008) by Brian K — 13 Apr 2013

'Righteous Kill', written by Russel Gewirtz, could have been an interesting and enjoyable thriller. The story is great. The direction and cinematography are awful. This has got to be one of the ugliest looking movies to come out in a while. The editing is nauseatingly fast cutting and brutal to the senses. The music, like it usually is in these types of movies, is annoying and overly used(there's probably music from start to finish). The performances are about the only thing that makes this movie the least bit interesting.

Robert DeNiro plays Turk and Al Pacino plays Rooster. There's another character named Spider(50 Cent. When will filmmakers learn that rappers can't act?). Well, you've got two characters whose names are animals, and the third has a name that sounds close to an animal(Turk-ey) and none of them have last names, why do all the other characters have normal first and last names? Just an interestingly question I'd like to ask Gewirtz.

Anyways, Turk and Rooster are police partners and a whole lot of bodies are turning up, dead and with poems upon their bodies. Well, come to find out, all the bodies that are turning up are horrible gangsters, thugs, low lifes, murderers, child molestors, etc. Well, not only that, but the pattern of the crimes could only mean that the killer is a police officer. There are two other detectives working on the case(John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg) who immediately point their fingers at Turk. The rest of the film involves Turk trying to prove his innocence with the help of Rooster.

Well, to be honest, this movie just isn't for me. I was completely uninterested from beginning to end. The poems that turn up on the bodies are so stupid and childish, and the plot twist at the end isn't all that surprising, but it does carry a lot of inconsistencies. There's story elements that are introduced and then quickly disappear, and there's a sex scene in the film that I'm still scratching my head at. Not really a scene, actually, just a shot of two people having sex in shadow, one of them saying, "Harder, harder" before it quickly cuts away. I really don't see the purpose of this shot in the film. Nor do I find a purpose to the film itself. Just a lot of nonsense and rubbish if you ask me.