10 Movies Everyone Wanted To Love (But Nobody Did)
4. Righteous Kill
The marketing for 2008's cop thriller Righteous Kill relentlessly hyped it up as the first film ever featuring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino as co-leads, after sharing just a few scant minutes of screen time together in Michael Mann's Heat.
And by god, the appeal of seeing the two screen legends starring together as grizzled, aged detectives hunting down a serial killer speaks for itself - give this to a Denis Villeneuve or David Fincher and you've got instant fireworks.
But under the direction of the considerably less-accomplished Jon Avnet - admittedly working with a weak sauce script - Righteous Kill was a spectacularly generic cop romp, memorable only for a howlingly ridiculous last-minute plot twist.
De Niro and Pacino certainly try with what they've got, but it's not much, ensuring their much-ballyhooed big-screen reunion ended up feeling like a garden variety, straight-to-video thriller joint.
In 2019, De Niro freely admitted that both he and Pacino regretted making the movie, though at least they were eventually able to re-team once more for an altogether worthier project - Martin Scorsese's masterful The Irishman.