Oh... And
Righteous Kill 3/10
Complete Garbage. Maybe it's because It didn't live up to my expectations for a Pacino/RD collab, or maybe because you could see the ending coming a mile away. Either way, it sucked a heavy one.
i had already decided to skip this...this may be their first reunion since michael mann's heat... i like mann, & that movie had its moment,
but i thought it was horrifically contrived, "hollywood" suspension-of-disbelief stretching to the breaking point that the criminal mastermind & lead detective would pow wow over a cup of joe...
and is it just me, or has al pacino only played one role since at least the 90s... AL PACINO...
Heat is one of my favorite movies ever, but would agree about that scene - it was a weak point of the movie. It basically had 2 points:1. Just getting the 2 great actors in the room at the same time with some sort of dialog. Seems like this was most of the point to the scene. People just want to see great actors going head to head, not just being in the same movie.
2. Just gave a reason to have the whole "the heat coming around the corner" dialog, and to point out they are not that different - just on opposite sides of the law.
See, I love the movie and that is by far one of my favorite scenes. Is it totally Hollywood to put Pacino and DeNiro in that diner? Yes. But I believe that this is a meeting that could happen in real life.
I guess it's one of those things that I expected more. I guess the beauty of it is the laid back tone they take. There's that subtle tone of them ####### with the other - Pacino thinks they are on him like glue and DeNiro knows he is slipping them in about 10 mins. Just always stuck out as kinda silly - he speeds after him on the highway just to pull him over and ask him out on a date to drink some coffee.
I like that it was understated. Had they been yelling or acted much more intense, it would have felt too fake. But Mann sets up a criminal character that is very smart and hard to catch. So all Pacino's character can do is talk to him to try to get some insight into his personality.
couple thoughts here...maybe i'll have to see this again, its been a while...
i also vaguely remember not liking val kilmer in this (though i thought he was great in recent years in salton sea & kiss kiss bang bang)... i like actors who don't seem like they're acting, but inhabit their character like a suit of clothes... for some reason, i think i didn't buy him here...
i could see a criminal & detective meeting, but it would be more natural & realistic to have them meet at the perps home or place of business, or bring them into the station... that must happen all the time (though probably wouldn't go down like that if a gang was being staked out undercover)... not to put too fine a point on it, but when the police were closing in on charles manson, somehow i can't picture the detective asking him out to a starbucks (don't think they had them then, but you know what i mean) for a venti caramel macchiato & a blueberry scone?
Kilmer was very good in those (I thought he was in Alexander and Wonderland as well recently, and a little longer ago in Ghost & Darkness, Tombstone, The Doors) but I liked him in Heat. I thought he played the adulterer/bad, but loving husband of the crew great. His character wasnt supposed to have the planning and precision of DeNiro's character, the soldier mentality of Danny Trejo, the desperation of Mykelti Williamson, or the right hand man of Tom Sizemore. He was, for a lack of better words, the young loose cannon combined with the aforementioned characteristics. I thought he pulled his character off great in Heat.Heat is 1 of my favorite films, but when I say favorite, I probably mean Top 20 because I cant narrow it down anymore.
As for their meeting - wasnt it just chance? or DeNiro was there and somehow Pacino knew he would be?? I dont remember exactly, so it might have been set up, but thats what I remember. But, based on the examples you said, I dont think the cops knew where DeNiro lived at that point (or his name even), he didnt have a place of business, and I think Pacino respected him too much to bring him in for questioning (similar to what was said as to them being the same guy on a different side).
So I guess when you said he was contrived though, you just meant this scene, or no?
yes yinzer,i was referring more to the scene than the movie as a whole in my original comment... though as i said, there were other aspects of the movie i vaguely remember not being blown away by (i have followed michael mann's career since manhunter & miami vice & am generally a fan... maybe i was somewhat disappointed by high expectations generated by some of his best previous work... also of course from the highly anticipated reunion of deniro & pacino, which didn't live up to expectations for me)... of course, i'm at a disadvantage in any kind of in-depth, scene-by-scene critique or character analysis with someone who likes it a lot & has seen it a lot, since... i didn't & therefor haven't...
BTW, i saw your question earlier & sorry for not answering it earlier... i meant to address it in the post immediately above but digressed into other realms...
as i also said, seeing as how this seems to be a polarizing movie, my interest has been piqued enough to revisit it & see what all the ruckus is about, & to see if i change my mind (though i don't think i will about "THE SCENE"
)...
i get ideas from others just like everybody else, & honestly i think i first took notice of what i later thought was the absurdity of the scene in an (at least partially) unsympathetic review... now i remember nothing else about the review but that stuck, as i agreed...
since i tend to read ebert most (the only writer to receive a pulitzer for his film criticism?), i tracked his review down, but as you can see, that obviously wasn't it, as he had high praise for it... i thought maybe the phrase tete-a-tete was in the review, & i found something but that wasn't exactly it either... similarly no dice by trying contrived as a key word search... i didn't spend a lot of time on this, & perhaps could have tracked down the original review i saw (i think i would recognize it), but it did serve as an instructive reminder on how, just like posters in this thread, reviewers & critiques could be diametrically opposed, & everthing from the direction, writing & acting could be very divisive & polarizing... i thought it might be an interesting exercise & instructuve to line several reviews up side by side (so to speak)... they also served as a scaffolding to help prop up my memory of the contentious "SCENE", towards the end & furthering the purpose of answering some of the questions we both had about it... see below... first two reviews, the latter by ebert (who i respect a lot), could hardly be more different... ebert not only doesn't mind the SCENE but appreciates it... maybe i'm too much of a literalist (though i don't think this is usually the case)?
one of the great things about movie criticism in general & this thread specifically is there can be so many divergent opinions to reconcile... i find that stimulating & mind-stretching... while a mundane & pedestrian observation, it would be boring if everybody saw the same thing... like with football scouting, even when dozens of scouts are looking at the EXACT SAME film & several minute highlight package, they can see many different things because there are literally hundreds/thousands of things to see, different people naturally attend selectively to some aspects of the perceptual field at the expense of others, & following from that, naturally come to different conclusions...
there are more parallels... i have found by trying to break down prospects in terms of "COMP PLAYERS" (ie - trying to mentally categorize, define & understand incoming prospects by comparing & contrasting them with current & former NFL players that had similar physical characteristics, constellations of attibutes & skill set arrays), the greater the caliber of scouts i use (frank coyle, bloom, etc) to inform my opinions & sharpen my judgements, the wider my associational net becomes in helping to trap new associations... the more extensive history you have to call upon can also help to make sense of & render intelligible incoming information... seeing a gifted defensive analyst like staffer jene bramel break down physical attributes & skill sets & very nearly "reducing" them into a set of defined "atomic elements" (& john norton's positional breakdown is almost like mendelyev's ((sp?)) periodic table of elements
) can't help but make your internal software (conceptual apparatus) more discerning & powerful...
similarly, i enjoy reading reviews by critics steeped in history like ebert & encyclopedic breakdowns into "atomic elements" (such as afore-cited wikipedia noir article) & they in turn help deepen my appreciation & the resonance of what i'm seeing/thinking...
* haven't seen many of the kilmer vehicles you mentioned, but i also liked him in the doors & wonderland...
** a possible convergence of the cop like robber noir staple can be found in mann's earlier (& for me better) manhunter, in which william peterson is able to solve the crime by an act of almost sympathetic putting himself in the criminal's head space, & attempting to make inferences about the killer's mental conditions from the crime scene reconstruction, which fuels his ability to get in his mind & predict what he will do next... in fact lecter (imo a superior & more truly terrifying & sinister bryan cox than the later, over the top hollywood rendition by hopkins) tells him something to the effect of, we are the same, when will goes to the sanitarium/prison for the criminally insane to ask him for help in catching the elusive & increasingly deadly tooth fairy... this SERIOUSLY creeps out peterson, when lecter pursues the line of questioning of why did you catch me (also involves a great sequence where lecter asks if, by implication, peterson is smarter (since he caught him), & he responds that no, but lecter had disadvantages... he is insane
)...
*** potential spoiler alert/warning in three reviews below, two for heat & one for righteous kill...
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http://www.hackwriters.com/Heat.htm
"Director Michael Mann seems to be a B director of A films. By that I mean his films lack any vision, or unifying elements that stamp them ‘Michael Mann’- he is so hit and miss in so many ways. Think about it- whatever you think of him, the moment a Tarantino film starts you know it. Mann would have, 50 years ago, been the talented but consummate studio director. Perhaps the only unifying element that Mann films have are that they are all far too long. I’ve now seen four of his films, two excellent ones- Manhunter (far better than its remake, Red Dragon, or any of the Anthony Hopkins Hannibal Lecter films- see Nixon for a truly scary Hopkins!) and The Insider . -Plus two mediocre to bad ones- Ali and now, Heat.
The good films overcome their length by the strength of their scripts and the quality of the actors. The two bad ones do not. Will Smith gives an embarrassingly comic imitation of Muhammad Ali in a hagiographic whitewash of his career, while Heat is such a clichéd cops and robbers flick that I marvel at how many gullible people there are online.
In researching the film the most bandied about words were ‘epic’ and ‘masterpiece’. The film is neither. While the latter term is possibly debatable (not really) the former is not. Epic simply is not equivalent to long. Epic means that the work deals with larger than life characters, situations, and tragedy. Heat is populated by banal small-time off-the-rack clichés of what Hollywood thinks criminals are, not the real deal, has wholly unrealistic situations- especially involving the characters, and cannot, by definition, be tragic since the characters that take a fall are not grand, nor even grandiloquent, to begin with. And, at just 10 minutes shy of 3 hours, it makes KB2 feel like a breezy Looney Tune.
The film, much hyped for the first onscreen meeting of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, opens with an only in Hollywood heist of an armored bank truck. The newest member of the gang- Waingro (Kevin Gage) - panics, which results in the murder of the three guards. De Niro’s character, Neil McCauley, the gang’s leader, attempts to kill the screw up, but he escapes. Meanwhile, Vincent Hanna (Pacino), LAPD homicide expert, takes over the case. Needless digressions include Hanna’s failing marriage with his faithless wife Justine (Diane Venora) and suicidal stepdaughter (Natalie Portman), Waingroe’s revelation as a serial killer of prostitutes, McCauley’s contrived and sparkless romance with a lonely bookworm 25 years his junior, Eady (Amy Brenneman), and the backstory of the newest member of the gang. If the long and superfluous digressions are not bad enough, the implausible action scenes and character interactions are worse- this is an absolutely abominable screenplay, folks. Here are just some of the implausibilities: after figuring out that McCauley’s thieves have turned the tables on him Hanna stops McCauley, who absurdly agrees to a cup of joe with him. This is the big ‘Clash of Titans’ the film hypes, but is as realistic as John Ashcroft breaking bread with Osama bin Laden. Instead, we get insipid **** on the table banter as Hanna warns McCauley he just might have to ‘take him out’. McCauley counters, ‘Oh yeah? I just might have to take you out.’ It would have been a hoot had McCauley replied, ‘You talkin’ to me?’, but no such luck.
When the main bank robbery goes awry McCauley and his sidekick Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), kill dozens with machine guns in downtown LA, while the new guy and their other partner Michael Cheritto, (Tom Sizemore), get killed, Kilmer gets wounded, yet somehow McCauley carries him and the loot to a shot up car and escapes. Made a year after the O.J. Simpson murders one wonders where the LAPD helicopters were to not let the bad guys escape so easily? Eady realizes her new beau, whom she has nothing in common with, is a stone cold killer, as she sees him on a newscast of the shootout. She flees into the night, is followed by McCauley, captured, and dragged back to his place. Of course, love wins out and she consents to go on the run with him to New Zealand (huh?). Having made his great Hollywood escape McCauley just cannot let things rest and jet off with his lover. This is supposed to illustrate his tragic side. He first does in one of his ‘backers’ who doublecrossed him, then goes after Waingroe, who’s stashed at a hotel, under LAPD watch, to trap McCauley. He leaves his lover in the car and tells her to keep it running. He evades the cops and their security cameras by simply pulling a fire alarm. He does in Waingroe, then escapes. But, the hotel is in a panic.
He sees Hanna coming for him outside the hotel. He takes off. Hanna, without any backup or telling anyone where he’s going, takes off after McCauley with a machine gun. They clash on the run through the runways of LAX, where Hanna shoots McCauley. The two men- one a mad dog killer and the other a workaholic cop- hold hands as McCauley dies. This was supposed to symbolize that they made some connection only men can know when they measured each other’s ######## over coffee. Forget that McCauley murdered at least a dozen of Hanna’s fellow brother cops in the bank heist - Hanna ‘understands’ this man because he’s a cop that’s ‘on the edge’- a phrase he actually uses to describe himself. Why not say ‘outta control’, too? Then again, McCauley is so sympathetic to him because Hanna realizes that he is like McCauley, who earlier said, ‘I don’t know who I am any more.’
This midlife crisis, apparently, the motivation for his heists and mass murder. Repeat after me, my children- OY! Meanwhile Kilmer’s character escapes capture because the wife he abused, Charlene (Ashley Judd), somehow overlooks his scumminess and helps him escape. These two characters were so one-dimensional you have to wonder why Mann got big stars to play them? Kilmer - so great in The Doors and The Salton Sea - simply phones in his performance. Same goes for the superfluous caricatures acted by John Voight, Tom Sizemore, and Natalie Portman.
In short, Heat is a mediocre movie at best - its visual style accounting for whatever props it deserves. It was only two years later that the brilliant L.A. Confidential came along and showed America what a truly great crime film could be. As for the DVD itself? It’s no-frills- there’s no commentary, three trailers, but the actual transfer of the film print is very clean, as is the sound quality. Curiously, the DVD package seems to recapitulate the making of the film: great attention paid to the shine, but a fairly hollow core.
I waited years to see this film because it was so overhyped, just like I waited years to see the abominable Schindler’s List. Heat is not that bad, but post-9/11 this sort of juvenilia all seems kind of unreal. Can I have my weekend back?"
© Dan Schneider, May 2004
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http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.d.../512150302/1023
Heat
BY ROGER EBERT / December 15, 1995
"There is a sequence at the center of Michael Mann's "Heat" that illuminates the movie's real subject. As it begins, a Los Angeles police detective named Hanna (Al Pacino) has been tracking a high-level thief named McCauley (Robert De Niro) for days. McCauley is smart and wary and seems impossible to trap. So, one evening, tailing McCauley's car, Hanna turns on the flashers and pulls him over.
McCauley carefully shifts the loaded gun he is carrying. He waits in his car. Hanna approaches it and says, "What do you say I buy you a cup of coffee?" McCauley says that sounds like a good idea.
The two men sit across from each other at a Formica table in a diner: Middle-aged, weary, with too much experience in their lines of work, they know exactly what they represent to one other, but for this moment of truce they drink their coffee.
McCauley is a professional thief, skilled and gifted. When Hanna subtly suggests otherwise, he says, "You see me doing thrill-seeking holdups with a `Born to Lose' tattoo on my chest?" No, says the cop, he doesn't. The conversation comes to an end. The cop says, "I don't know how to do anything else." The thief says, "Neither do I." The scene concentrates the truth of "Heat," which is that these cops and robbers need each other: They occupy the same space, sealed off from the mainstream of society, defined by its own rules.
They are enemies, but in a sense they are more intimate, more involved with each other than with those who are supposed to be their friends - their women, for example.
The movie's other subject is the women. Two of the key players in "Heat" have wives, and in the course of the movie, McCauley will fall in love, which is against his policy. Hanna is working on his third marriage, with a woman named Justice (Diane Venora), who is bitter because his job obsesses him: "You live among the remains of dead people." One of McCauley's crime partners is a thief named Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), whose wife is Charlene (Ashley Judd).
McCauley's own policy is never to get involved in anything that he can't shed in 30 seconds flat. One day in a restaurant he gets into a conversation with Eady (Amy Brenneman), who asks him a lot of questions. "Lady," he says to her, "why are you so interested in what I do?" She is lonely. "I am alone," he tells her. "I am not lonely." He is in fact the loneliest man in the world, and soon finds that he needs her.
This is the age-old conflict in American action pictures, between the man with "man's work" and the female principal, the woman who wants to tame him, wants him to stay at home. "Heat," with an uncommonly literate screenplay by Mann, handles it with insight. The men in his movie are addicted to their lives. There is a scene where the thieves essentially have all the money they need. They can retire. McCauley even has a place picked out in New Zealand. But another job presents itself, and they cannot resist it: "It's the juice. It's the action." The movie intercuts these introspective scenes with big, bravura sequences of heists and shoot-outs. It opens with a complicated armored car robbery involving stolen semis and tow trucks. It continues with a meticulously conceived bank robbery.
McCauley is the mastermind. Hanna is the guy assigned to guess his next move.
The cops keep McCauley and his crew under 24-hour surveillance, and one day follow them to an isolated warehouse area, where the thieves stand in the middle of a vast space and McCauley outlines some plan to them. Later, the cops stand in the same place, trying to figure out what plan the thieves could possibly have had in mind. No target is anywhere in view. Suddenly Hanna gets it: "You know what they're looking at? They're looking at us - the LAPD. We just got made." He is right. McCauley is now on a roof looking at them through a lens, having smoked out his tail.
De Niro and Pacino, veterans of so many great films in the crime genre, have by now spent more time playing cops and thieves than most cops and thieves have. There is always talk about how actors study people to base their characters on. At this point in their careers, if Pacino and De Niro go out to study a cop or a robber, it's likely their subject will have modeled himself on their performances in old movies. There is absolute precision of effect here, the feeling of roles assumed instinctively.
What is interesting is the way Mann tests these roles with the women. The wives and girlfriends in this movie are always, in a sense, standing at the kitchen door, calling to the boys to come in from their play. Pacino's wife, played by Venora with a smart bitterness, is the most unforgiving: She is married to a man who brings corpses into bed with him in his dreams. Her daughter, rebellious and screwed up, is getting no fathering from him. Their marriage is a joke, and when he catches her with another man, she accurately says he forced her to demean herself.
The other women, played by Judd and Brenneman, are not quite so insightful. They still have some delusions, although Brenneman, who plays a graphic artist, balks as any modern woman would when this strange, secretive man expects her to leave her drawing boards and her computer and follow him to uncertainty in New Zealand.
Michael Mann's writing and direction elevate this material.
It's not just an action picture. Above all, the dialogue is complex enough to allow the characters to say what they're thinking: They are eloquent, insightful, fanciful, poetic when necessary. They're not trapped with cliches. Of the many imprisonments possible in our world, one of the worst must be to be inarticulate - to be unable to tell another person what you really feel. These characters can do that. Not that it saves them."
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review of righteous kill
http://www.flipsidemovies.com/righteouskill.html
Review by Rob Vaux
The disturbing lack of buzz surrounding Righteous Kill gives some indication of the fetid mediocrity on display. Considering that it pairs Al Pacino and Robert De Niro for the first time since Heat -- and considering how lionized their tête-à-tête was in that earlier film -- it's disappointing to watch Righteous Kill slowly squander their talent. Though not strictly bad, it certainly edges towards the perfunctory, a status ill befitting the cinematic legends at its heart. Indeed, were two other actors present in the leads, the film would barely merit mention at all.
Director John Avnet sets himself a tall order by working in a deeply mined genre -- the police procedural/serial killer mystery which, while still capable of good things in the right hands, will hardly blow anyone away with its originality. The scenario creaks on its hinges with every turn, buoyed by some decent dialogue but otherwise identical to any USA movie of the week. The big hook is that the murderer is likely a cop. His victims are criminals who successfully defied the legal system, and his methods display an intimate knowledge of how the police investigate a crime scene. He puts a bullet in their heads and leaves the untraceable weapon behind, along with a note card bearing a crude bit of poetry which recounts the miscreant's sins.
Hardy the makings of immortal crime drama, which is why Avnet relies largely on his stars to take point. As the two detectives assigned to the case, they have plenty of opportunities to toss out sharp quips and blow our socks off with their crime-solving acumen. Turk (De Niro) is the bad-cop half: all curses and veiled threats as he charges through the streets of New York like a bull in a china shop. Rooster (Pacino) is far more laid-back, defusing his partner's outbursts with a pat on the back and a few dirty jokes. Their easy banter makes for the best moments in Righteous Kill, squabbling with each other like Hepburn and Tracy while leaving their supporting cast (including Carla Gugino, Donnie Wahlberg, and John Leguizamo) in a state of hushed awe. Screenwriter Russell Gerwitz gives them a fair helping of choice lines as they slowly work their way towards the killer (who may be *gasp* One of Their Own), couched in typical copland scenes of running down suspects and talking out clues. Clichéd though they may be, such periods have their share of zip, and Avnet exploits his actors' sense of timing extremely well.
Unfortunately, little else about Righteous Kill can match those modest achievements. The warmed-over Silence of the Lambs routine has a few mildly interesting turns, but never generates sufficient interest either as hard boiled verité or more gimmicky exploitation fare. The final twist (and you knew there was going to be a final twist) begins as merely serviceable before descending into borderline camp through a series of unnecessary embellishments. At times Avnet flirts with the old "thin blue line" debate -- whether it is acceptable to break the law in the name of justice -- but skitters away from the meat of it in favor of Death Wish-style button pushing. Extraneous narrative elements abound, from a coke-using lawyer (Trilby Glover) caught in a vice to some tacked-on nonsense about Turk's girlfriend (Gugino) which serves no purpose other than to keep her relevant.
And the problems extend to the marquee performers as well. Certainly, they exhibit considerable chemistry and they've been doing this long enough to deliver compelling performances in their sleep. But for all his shouts and bullying, De Niro lacks the menace of earlier roles; there's simply no Travis Bickle edginess beneath the glaring eyes. Pacino does better with a more easygoing character, but he also struggles when the time comes to convey his toughness. Considering the frightening intensity for which the two are justly famous, their work here feels curiously inert: like a pair of ghosts aping deeds long past.
To be sure, they've both made worse movies than Righteous Kill. More than once. And the brief running time here may disguise how little steak lies beneath the sizzle of their presence. But that still can't elevate the proceedings beyond the utterly forgettable, nor excuse the fumbling of what should have been a grade-A cinematic event. Fans in need of a Pacino/De Niro hit can just watch the coffee-shop scene from Heat again: it's 20 times cooler and 80 minutes shorter. Righteous Kill clearly aspires to similar magic, but ultimately does little more than remind us how great they used to be.
Review published 09.12.2008.
several times
Cage certainly didn't help the movie, but I think the script was lousy too. There were several scenes where I thought to myself, "Seriously? This guy's a professional hitman?"
...that guy went out of his way to rip stuff on it (and you might want to put that 1 in a spoiler bc he gives away a lot of important details)I also like that review of Righteous Kill. Probably about as accurate as it gets for that movie. Like I said a few times here, its not great, but its not as bad as most people seem to make it out to be. Its moves fast, is entertaining, and more than anything Pacino and DeNiro give their best performances in a decade and are just fun to watch
