Justice for Poets: Rightous Kill

Did a good cop really kill those who somehow beat the system? Should we forgive him if he did? How do fourteen murders over thirty years go unnoticed? How do we manage to sustain any commitment to justice? These are some of the questions raised by Righteous Kill.

Righteous Kill, from the writer of Inside Man, is less a cop-suspense film than it is a tragic story of love and betrayal. The film is simultaneously engaging and disquieting. Headliners Robert De Niro and Al Pacino play the story’s leads: a pair of veteran NYPD cops (Turk and Rooster, respectively) on the trail of a vigilante serial killer.

We’ve seen a whole subgenre of movies that re-cast their moral compass in a manner that compels them take lives in order to protect themselves or others – Taxi Driver and more recently The One, come to mind. Almost all the comic flicks involve vigilante justice, Batman isn’t testifying in court or filling out a police report. In Righteous Kill, it seems, someone is also dissatisfied with the injustices of the justice system.

From the out set we’re lead to believe it’s an inside job. The film opens with a crackly, black and white TV displays Turk, on what looks like an interrogation video. He states calmly that he murdered 14 people during his 30 years on the NYPD.

If this is the story, than what’s the point? Nothing left to figure out. Unless it’s the righteousness of the murders, the justice he’s bringing with a tainted badge. This confession lapses back to the first vigilante act: Turk convinces his partner, Rooster, to plant a gun on a kiddy-killer, who’d been acquitted for raping and murdering his girlfriend’s 10 year-old daughter. Here, so it seems, is where justice becomes a personal matter, where the line blurs and the killing begins. Back to the confession tape Turk claims he served justice when the system couldn’t.

While this is a well done genre film, what makes it worth the fare is the brolove shared by the pair of cops whose partnership has spanned three decades. Their bond is vulnerable and touching.