With two actors of the calibre of Robert de Niro and Al Pacino, you would expect Righteous Kill to serve up a more-than-decent New York police thriller.
Unfortunately, the two former Godfather stars cannot do enough to rescue this badly written, muddled and cliched American cop flick.
De Niro (Turk) and Pacino (Rooster) play two veteran detectives investigating a string of murders where all the victims are criminals who have slipped through the fingers of the justice system.
For every dead body which is found, a short four-line poem accompanies the corpse, and it soon becomes clear that the perpetrator may well be a cop.
But the plot's attempts to be clever and quirky, flicking back and forth through time, fail miserably.
Instead the film appears to stutter and is confused and incoherent, while the lead characters often lack credibility.
Sixty-five-year-old De Niro's efforts to look athletic as he cumbersomely chases bad-guys through the city's side streets are nothing but comical.
And yet even these moments pale in comparison to the disturbingly oafish sex scene where he beds a fellow cop half his age.
A wooden performance by gangster Curtis ‘50 Cent’ Jackson adds to the accidental comedy, but luckily Righteous Kill pulls its head back above water when Donnie Wahlberg and John Leguizamo enter the frame.
Playing the younger more dynamic cop pairing, Detectives Ted Riley and Simon Perez are given all the best lines and deliver them well.
Walking into a gangster's hotel room, where a dead body lies on the floor, Perez quips: “I have never seen anything like it. It's incredible.” The camera then pans to a shot of an extra-wide-screen plasma television.
Compare this with Pacino’s “What's wrong with him - PMS?” and it’s easy to see how Walhberg and Leguizamo come out on top in the acting stakes.
Only De Niro and Pacino know why they chose this film to make their second screen appearance together (following Heat in 1995).
But this is not just poor by their standards – it’s poor by any standards.
Righteous Kill (15) is released on DVD and Blu-ray on Feb 16.
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