Righteous Kill

Righteous Kill (Jon Avnet, 2008) Someone is killing Scott Free's—those scum-bags that you just know are guilty but have some smooth-talking fancy-pants lawyer or some milque-toast judge who lets 'em walk, sneering, to prey on Society again...until they show up with a bullet-hole in the middle of their forehead.  Two buddy cops, Turk (Robert De Niro) and Rooster (Al Pacino) start to add things up when one of the perps they arrested shows up deader than a Keanu Reeves performance.  Looks like it's murder "and somebody's responsible."  A vigilante?  Certainly.  But, if its revenge they're after, why are so many of these guys showing up dead?  It's then that they think that the killer may be a cop.

But who?

Complicating matters is that most of the cops, including De Niro, Pacino, plus Carla Gugino, John Leguizamo, plus Donnie Wahlberg-o are creeps, so it could be any of 'em, except for the Captain of the squad (Brian Dennehy) but only because you couldn't believe Dennehy could sneak up on anybody but a bed-ridden quadriplegic.

So the question is: which of the crazy actors is playing the crazy character killing all these people?

The answer: who cares?  With a movie this terrible, and victims painted so sneeringly evil they're cartoons it's hard to work up much sympathy or even interest in finding their killer.  That's the problem of the writer.  But director Avnet is so ham-fisted, he can't seem to hold a shot or light a set without sabotaging the drama of a scene.  He's so busy "nuancing" things that you have trouble following the plot.  He's not even talented enough to get out of the way of De Niro and Pacino (or, God forbid, rein them in) to make a scene play.

And, let's face it, having those two legends on the screen should be a treat: they didn't work together in The Godfather: Part II (obviously), but their scenes in Michael Mann's Heat were tantalizingly short.  Here, they're in almost every scene together (although Avnet can't seem to find the wherewithal to keep them in the same shot), and you realize they're like oil and water, or Mumbles and Loudmouth—they're two actors who've known each other for years, but their characters don't seem to.  Or else the movie would be over in five minutes.  But no, the suspicions and subsequent doubts must be fully explored, the red herrings must stink up the joint, and the script-writer must throw in a couple of feints that make no sense once the movie is over—they're there just to con the audience.*

What a waste.  The big mystery is given this script, how could it attract two of the most iconic, respected and (when paired) legendary actors?  Sounds like the biggest con was going on behind the scenes. Righteous Kill is the last thing you would expect a film starring De Niro and Pacino would be—a very pedestrian run-of-the-mill movie.

* Now, movies are by nature, the manipulation of reality—and the audience—to tell a story.  But, there's doing it well, and there's doing it the Righteous Kill way.  This week, we'll look at a movie that stylishly—and very slyly—does it right.

Silverado

Silverado (1985)

What a Western is, is a picture frame, and you can put any kind of picture you want in there. With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it's empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.

Lawrence Kasdan interviewed March 21, 2003 IGN.com


"Now, I don't wanna kill you and you don't wanna be dead".


Silverado is like every Western you have ever seen and, inevitably, like no other. It feels like it is director Lawrence Kasdan's homage and reinvention to the Westerns of his past in the way that his screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark seemed to be his updated tribute to the Saturday morning serials of his youth. It has just about every cliché you can remember: the four heroes with their code of honor who come riding across the scrubland; the crooked sheriff; the rapacious cattle rancher; the vulnerable wagon train; the saloon; the whore with a heart of gold; the slick gambler (called Slick); the classic Western town; the final gun duel in the empty street; the gun slinger with his twirling Colt 45's; a rousing score by Bruce Broughton that sounds like every Western score you have ever heard and most of all, 'that' landscape and so on and so on. Copies they may be but ones that have a faithfulness that comes from an appreciation for the genre rather than a mockery.

Kasdan keeps the action going with a shoot-out every fifteen minutes even as it builds to the classic confrontation. The script fairly crackles with cowboy dialogue melded with witty one-liners. Even the anachronisms seem to work: an African-American gunslinger (Danny Glover) and a feminist pioneer (Rosanna Arquette). Yet the movie has a modern sensibility too - the heroes aren't quite the pure 'white hats' - Kevin Kline plays Paden, a drifter, who is happy to casually kill a man for stealing his hat even though he will risk jail to save a stray dog and throws his lot in with the villainous Sheriff Cobb (Brian Dennehy) before he is forced to act on his better instincts. Kevin Costner is surprisingly bearable (given his later outings) as the happy-go-lucky sociopathic brother of Scott Glenn who comes to the rescue time and time again. Added to this you also get John Cleese as an ex-pat sheriff and Jeff Goldblum , the aforementioned Slick as well as Linda Hunt, who comes close to stealing the whole movie as Stella the owner of the Midnight Star Saloon.