Other than the immediate appeal of seeing Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino on screen together for the first time since Heat in 1995, there is very little special or interesting about Righteous Kill. And it’s too bad because there are elements of the movie that are so good and so fitting for each of them (like DeNiro grinning and threatening a child molester on his way out of the courtroom on a technicality) that it’s clear that the movie has a lot of what it takes to be a much better thriller.

DeNiro and Pacino play two veteran NYPD detectives who have been friends and partners for about as long as either of them can remember. Their latest case is lifted right out of The Boondock Saints - a vigilante killer who is systematically killing off violent criminals who have fallen through the cracks of the judicial system. This is, of course, a highly appealing premise - there are few things quite as satisfying as seeing a murderer or rapist or child molester getting shot at point blank range and then a four-line poem tossed onto their chest rhyming out the justification for their death. Well, it’s satisfying to see in a movie anyway. To be perfectly honest, I’m not all that into seeing anyone get shot in real life, poem or not.

But sadly, the movie falls completely flat in its handling of the mystery of who the real killer is. There is a strong implication early in the movie (from the first frame, as it were) that the killer is one of the two main detectives, and there are two other detectives, played by Donnie Wahlberg and John Leguizamo, who are also working the case and increasingly develop the same suspicions.

But there is a cheap method of maintaining tension and dramatic tension that lower level thrillers and mystery movies use, which is to plainly and deliberately lead the audience in the wrong direction before wildly swinging the plot around like a carnival ride near the end. Righteous Kill gives us clues that seem so obvious that they appear to be storytelling techniques rather than plot points, but it’s no use here to try to figure out the mystery, just try to enjoy the ride. Clever moviegoers will see through the constant misdirection like grandma’s underpants, as Bart Simpson would say, but any predictability is based on seeing through cheap film techniques, not figuring out an intricate story.

Al Pacino tries to calm Robert DeNiro down from the shock of realizing that 50 Cent is this much bigger than him.

And most of the ride is enjoyable. There’s more talk than I like in an action thriller starring two of the biggest badasses in movie history, but the story never drags despite being so thin on substance. Curtis Jackson gives a pretty good performance as basically himself, a recording artist/nightclub owner/designer drug dealer (hopefully that last part is fiction) who becomes the focus of Detectives Turk and Rooster’s (DeNiro and Pacino) latest case.

But there are two conflicting stories going on here - there is the story of the two detectives trying to figure out who this killer is that’s killing off the people that the judicial system is too dumb to catch, and the story of us trying to figure out where the plot is going, because the movie presents itself as though it hands us the answer at the beginning and we have to figure something else out. There is some tension generated by other detectives getting closer to what we think is the truth, but don’t go assuming you know all the answers just because you’re told at the start of the film.

John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg react to the news that they will not receive top billing.

Director John Avnet also directed a recent action thriller starring Al Pacino called 88 Minutes, which was something of a critical disaster, not the least reason for which was because of its highly disappointing ending. Similarly, he doesn’t seem to know how to end Righteous Kill, so he gives us a massive cliche, the good guy and the bad guy in an old abandoned warehouse pointing guns at each other in what I suppose is meant to be a tense standoff, except that there is never for a second the slightest doubt about how it will turn out.

Despite coming at the very end of the summer, this is one of the more anticipated late-summer releases, especially among action fans eager to see the two film legends finally on screen together again. Unfortunately, there is more effort put into overcoming all of what must be the massive complications involved in getting two guys like DeNiro and Pacino into a movie together than there is into making it a good movie beyond their presence. They inhabit their roles, as is to be expected, but the rest of the movie feels like it is hanging off of them like a wet paper bag. It’s more fun than a swift kick in the ass, but to say that we should expect better than this from them would be something of an understatement.