Righteous Kill
In his later years Charlie Chaplin made a film called Limelight that belatedly teamed him up with Buster Keaton.
It bowed out with a poignant musical number in which the two old rivals took to the stage, stirring memories of the way they were. I was reminded of this while watching Righteous Kill, a leaden police-procedural thriller starring Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino.
These titans of the American Method school remain very different beasts: Righteous Kill gives us the geyser (Pacino) versus the pressure cooker (DeNiro). But they deserved a better showcase than this. They play a pair of jaded New York cops on the trail of a serial killer.
Suspicion eventually falls on one of them, to the horror of the other. The plot feels perfunctory, as though it was penned in haste after the players signed on. The inevitable gun-toting finale is not so much a twist as a kind of arthritic waddle. — Xan Brooks