Righteous Kill

Righteous Kill (directed by Jon Avnet) features Robert de Niro and Al Pacino as gritty New York cops whose long-standing partnership is winding down towards retirement. Fans of these two actors will without a doubt feel let down that a better story line couldn’t be found to carry this much-awaited pairing. The film revisits the dilemma of the Dirty Harry films (which are cited here): what happens when the law enforcement system fails to protect the innocent, allowing the murderous guilty to slip through the judicial net? The readiness to cut corners and dispense vigilante justice ensnared Harry Callaghan, who at least had the honesty to throw away his badge at the end of Dirty Harry. Here, the declaration of David Fisk (‘Rooster’, played by Pacino) that ‘a little shooting’s OK, provided the right guys get shot’) doesn’t work as well as ‘Go ahead, punk, make my day’, but the sentiment is the same.

A serial killer is stalking New York, executing criminal low-life. Since the victims are genuine-carat scumbags who have managed to evade the law – a child killer, a drug-dealing pimp, a clerical paedophile – the department’s motivation to catch the executioner is not particularly strong, until the realisation dawns that the killer is probably a cop. Suspicion falls upon ‘Turk’ (Robert de Niro), and the friendship between Turk and Rooster comes under considerable strain.

Much more plot detail would constitute a ‘spoiler’; and yet it is the insistence on making this a ‘whodunnit’ that is the real clunking spoiler of what could have been an intriguing and weighty psychological thriller. As it is, the film stays on the surface, and much of the action is painting by numbers. One could say that the treatment of religion (Catholicism, of course) suffers from this same superficial treatment. There is a whiff of incense: a scene in a church, but this is simply the location of the priest abuser’s killing (he is shot in the confessional). Though one of the characters declares that he has ‘lost his faith’, it turns out he is not talking about his religious faith at all. By not even bothering to take seriously this plausible dimension, the film has to resort to the psychological. Both cops are under analysis, giving each an opportunity for methodic self-disclosure – but on this score, you would think that de Niro’s boats were well and truly burnt in Analyze This.

I recall being present at an interview with the Austrian film director Michael Harneke, who was defending the ‘reflective’ violence of Funny Games as a commentary on the unreflective violence of Rambo, Terminator and the like. His own brand of sadism, Harneke claimed, was intended to indict the audience, to force its recognition of how we are complicit in the screen violence that entertains us. Listeners were not impressed by what was felt to be Harneke’s special pleading; but with reference to Righteous Kill his argument seems to have a point. The victims of the serial killer are clinically dispatched, neat bullet-holes through the forehead, their guilt never in doubt. We do not know enough about them to be either repulsed by or sympathetic towards them; their corpses are extras to the central casting, the agonising of the two aging heroes. If  ‘righteous violence’ is the moral issue here, the treatment is skin-deep. Read this in the light of the fuss about the poster for Righteous Kill which was displayed outside Stockwell Underground Station, the site of the gunning down of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005. An unfortunate coincidence, or a richly apt comment on this film’s complacent amorality?

Michael Kirwan SJ



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