Righteous Kill (2008)

Righteous Kill arrives in 2008 as a crime thriller about two aging NYPD detectives hunting a serial killer who dispatches criminals the courts failed to convict. It is the third occasion De Niro and Pacino share a screen, and the first that feels like a contractual obligation. The picture was directed by Jon Avnet with the efficiency of a man who has done this before and will do it again. Its concerns are procedural and theological in a minor key: a justice system that leaks, a priest who molested children, a pimp, an acquitted rapist. These are the raw materials of vengeance, not of social instruction.

The cultural inventory is modest. The ensemble is naturally diverse in the manner of a New York precinct drama, with John Leguizamo and Saidah Arrika Ekulona and Sterling K. Brown appearing as detectives and an assistant district attorney without a single line drawing attention to it. Carla Gugino's Detective Corelli exists mostly as a romantic complication for her male colleagues and, later, as a rape victim whose assault motivates the men around her. The film has no interest in interrogating any of this, and so neither shall we, beyond the noting of it.

What moralizing exists is genre moralizing, the ancient complaint that the guilty walk free, which is a vigilante trope with a long and unprogressive pedigree. The film is too busy arranging its twist to lecture anyone. There is a final-act reveal, dutifully withheld, that reorders the preceding ninety minutes without deepening them. It is a dowdy exercise, as the consensus had it, and its cultural footprint is close to nil. We classify it, we file it, we move on. There is nothing righteous to be found here, and nothing to indict either, which is its own quiet tragedy.