Bad action and bad cops
Hollywood hits below the belt as two pre-holiday turkeys fly the coop
RIGHTEOUS KILL *
DIRECTED BY Jon Avnet
STARRING Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Carla Gugino
US 2008 101 min
EAGLE EYE *
DIRECTED BY DJ Caruso
STARRING Shia LeBoeuf and Michelle Monaghan
US 2008 118 min
Years ago a friend and I had an idea for a pilot for a television programme called Antiquing with Harvey Keitel. This was at about the time Keitel starred in The Bad Lieutenant. The concept was fairly simple. Keitel would enter into belligerent negotiations with an elderly Midwestern lady over a second-hand teapot, and end up beating her to a pulp. We quickly foresaw the attractiveness of guest appearances by the likes of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Pacino had already passed his Scent of A Woman milepost and spent a lot of screen time howling; De Niro had proven himself capable with a bat and was an avid spitter of insults. Or even better, we thought at the time, would be Pacino and De Niro in a single episode with Harvey Keitel, the three of them howling, spitting and beating unsuspecting old ladies selling teapots.
Jon Avnet must have been thinking along those lines when he conceived Righteous Kill, a crime drama whose raison d’être seems to be that it stars De Niro and Pacino, provoking those fans who have been waiting since Heat (which paired the two legends in a single scene) for just such a moment to shout for joy, “Finally, a whole film!” and beat each other with bats. It is the type of film where younger actors like John Leguizamo blessed to star in supporting roles will bubble in interviews included in DVD extras about the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to share the screen with their idols.
Honestly, though, even a howling Pacino and a bat-wielding De Niro together isn’t enough to sustain a film. Or a watery-eyed Pacino with a paunch and a pathologically cranky De Niro playing aging NYPD homicide detectives on the trail of a poetry-scribbling vigilante serial killer, as the case may be.
Avnet must have realised this too. So while Righteous Kill is primarily a Pacino-De Niro Joint, the film also attempts at being a thriller, a who-done-it, a buddy cop film, while managing to slip ably into melodrama, skimp at character motivation and baffle us with geriatric sex scenes featuring, mostly, Carla Gugino’s ass with Robert De Niro behind it. All of this gives Avnet and writer Russell Gewirtz the rare distinction of disappointing on so many levels that my head was actually spinning with ideas for unfeasible pilots by the time the credits rolled.
Raging testosterone, on the one hand, and waning sperm levels, on the other, are pumped in sloppily as motifs to support a twist-driven plot with the suspense of a sluggishly deflating balloon. De Niro’s 60-year-old Detective Thomas Cowan, or “Turk”, in outfits raided from the Meet The Parents wardrobe, is the victim of both. He is seen, glowering like Geronimo, being tossed out of a Little League baseball game for kicking sand at the umpire, bulldozing colleagues at a police softball picnic and hissing threats at upstart cops who challenge his integrity (actually who accuse of him being a psychopathic killer but what the hell). He is, in other words, a simmering bull whose love interest, forensic detective Karen Corelli (Carla Gugino), doesn’t help his anger management. No matter how hard he tries he can’t manage to deliver the rough sex she is used to getting from firemen and stevedores.
Pacino, playing Cowan’s partner, Detective David Fisk, a.k.a. “Rooster”, doesn’t howl in this film, doesn’t even come close. In fact, given the limited suspense offered by the plot, it was the only thing I was truly looking forward to. I was waiting patiently for Pacino to howl. Instead, he is a chess-playing, leather-clad, slightly foppish foil to De Niro’s snarling Cowan.
Sharing the screen, the two legends seem uncomfortable, almost as if they were afraid of touching each other’s egos and getting them dirty. They drink together, yes, De Niro scowling, Pacino cautioning patience from a bottomless well of moist-eyed sincerity, but no deep connection emerges. In fact, there seems to be very little character for their prodigious talents to inhabit, which may be the film’s basic problem. Other than the film itself, which seems to want to ask the question: What would drive a man to take justice into his own hands? But this too is tacked on sloppily in a moist-eyed confession towards the end.
Of course, neither the plot nor the dialogue give Pacino or De Niro much leeway to develop meaningful characters. Otherwise, how would Avnet drop-kick us in the head with the “surprise” at the end? Or toss us an exchange like: “Where are you going?” (De Niro) “I dunno. To hell, I suppose.” (Pacino). There are, additionally, several superfluous scenes that have to be explained with lines like, “Why the hell did we bother going there?” (i.e. to visit alleged child rapist and murderer Charles Randall in prison, a man they themselves framed). The reason — presumably to cover their tracks — is probably so Gewirtz could have Randall say, “Roses are red, violets are blue. I wanna poke your f***ing eyes out with my dick, you f***.”
The revelation, delivered early on, upon which the entire film hinges — that it is a cop who is committing the murders — is finessed into the plot in the following way. Hot-headed Detective Simon Perez (Leguizamo), the lone howler in the film, comes to this conclusion based on the fact that the killer “stakes out his victims”, limiting their search, theoretically, not only to psychopathic cops but to sharks, tax collectors and playful kittens.
It was pleasing to see that Brian Dennehy, playing weary, superannuated Lieutenant Hingis, has recovered from his mid-90’s work as the Ambassador for Zantac, but the three aging bulls together, with their talk of sperm levels and their incessant grumbling, remind one unsettlingly of a Cocoon reunion.
Which is worse, an inhumane government or an omniscient computer gone berserk and bent on exterminating that government for its crimes against humanity? The answer, according to Eagle Eye director DJ Caruso, is that governments make mistakes and should acknowledge them and move on, a platitude that glints, these days, with the authenticity of a gold front tooth. An alternative answer to that question is Hollywood directors with budgets in the multi-millions churning out high-octane, mind-numbing trash.
Apropos of the latter, Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) is a mid-twenties slacker working at The Copy Cabana, relieving his half-witted colleagues of their salaries at clandestine lunchtime poker tournaments. He is behind in his rent, though his landlady is batty and kind, and comes home from work one day to find his apartment flooded with gift packages (explosives, jet manuals, the latest in machine guns, etc.) from Hezbollah, a very difficult situation to explain. If LaBeouf had sprouted a full beard and turban and kept a copy of the Koran inscribed by Osama Bin Laden in his underpants, it would still have been a difficult situation to explain, given his puppy dog looks. He is quickly captured by the FBI’s Anti-Terrorist Division, lead by Agent Thomas Morgan, played, outlandishly, by Billy Bob Thorton.
Enter Rachel Holloway (Michelle Monaghan), single mother of a freckled, trumpet-playing cherub of a son on his way to Washington, DC with the elementary school orchestra to serenade the President with The Star-Spangled Banner. Coerced by a mysterious voice badgering them on their mobile phones, they end up together in a black Porsche Cayenne speeding through the night streets of Chicago with the FBI hot on their tail.
This leads to plenty of confusion for both parties, not to mention Agent Morgan, who is so baffled by their eventual escape he tells his staff that if they don’t get back to work, they’re “all demoted to something that involves touching shit with [their] hands!” Thorton delivers this line so perfectly you’d have sworn he’d written it himself, or that it was something they say in Arkansas, and maybe it is. And Thorton does well, considering the obstacles to sense, purpose and entertainment the film poses, until about midpoint when you realise that he’s realised the film is worthless and, like everyone else involved, sleepwalks through the rest of his lines.
The remaining hour is a snoozy high-speed chase attempting a paranoid information age momentum where humans are tormented by forces that can monitor them via an endless house of mirrors of mobile phones and cameras and monitoring devices, while they are still confined to old-fashioned, flesh-carrying modes of transit like buses and trains. In this way, the mystery caller (Julianne Moore), directress of the hapless duo’s cross-country escapades, leads them from metro station to bus depot, Circuit City to Pentagon, manipulating any medium of information transfer at her disposal, a true nightmare if it weren’t so clumsily done. “Jerry Shaw Enter Garage,” one marquee says. “Platform C, Jerry Shaw,” another. “You have four seconds, Jerry Shaw, to jump out that window.” I didn’t pity Jerry Shaw. Shia LaBeouf didn’t look like he pitied me.
The film is further hampered by the requisite baggage of personal confessions and character development that tend to be patched on to Hollywood blockbusters in the name of pacing. The twists are painfully exposed. In the Hollywood Twist Manual having a twin brother who has died under mystery circumstances is as good as a mallet to the head that some plot-propelling use will be made of it, and Shaw has one, and, of course, if he hadn’t, the story would have backfired. These are the kind of ideas I’d always imaged screenwriters puzzle over for months and eventually solve in a stroke of genius one night sometime just before last call.
But the most aggravating moments come at the very end, just when you thought the credits would bring you a reprieve, and which don’t matter one way or the other. It is a truly chilling experience when you discover that the film you’ve been struggling to keep awake through, despite the dizzying barrage of flying automobiles, screeching subway cars and airport baggage carousel gun fights, has a moral (please see above).
Essentially, the question Eagle Eye poses is a fairly thought-provoking one, but the film predictably avoids approaching any greyer terrain, settling instead for the comfort zone of facile black and white truths. And, like Righteous Kill, it takes a very simple premise and tortures it, for the sake of a foolish plot, until the original meaning is lost. Which explains why a film like The Borne Ultimatum, with a single, unremitting trajectory that manages to elevate the language and speed of the information age into a style, works and Eagle Eye doesn’t.
And, yes, I am a third-generation curmudgeon. Though I feel that Antiquing with Harvey Keitel now has a market, since Pacino and De Niro have taken to starring in buddy films. As for Shia LeBoeuf, they say his father was a circus mime and rodeo clown, so the sky is the limit.
Preston Wilder is away
