Righteous Kill

The good-guy serial killer has a long history in TV and movies. If one ever appears in real life, it won’t be nearly as much of a shock as it is every time it happens in fiction.

What’s refreshing about this trailer is that it puts all the genre’s tropes right out front. The cop’s ambivalence about what the killer is doing. Their complete lack of pretension about becoming cops to get respect. Their lack of remorse about killing. Their willingness to lie to Internal Affairs.

Usually, in this genre, someone is working their way from believing in black-and-white morality to believing in something more complex. Sometimes it’s the cop, sometimes it’s the audience. Here, it’s neither. These guys are not on a soul-searching journey. They know who they are. They have carved out their own moral ground, and if you want to go there, they’ll draw you a map.

It’s a gutsy move to begin a trailer with a wealthy movie star looking directly at the camera and saying “I’ve been a cop in the NYPD for over thirty years.”

Imagine hearing that line coming from any one of a number of actors the same age. How likely is it that you would chuckle to yourself the way you did when Keanu Reeves was introduced as “a young attorney” at the beginning of the trailer for The Devil’s Advocate? When you hear DeNiro say it, you believe that he knows what he’s talking about. And yet you also know that he’s played the bad guy more often than he’s played the cop. And that’s the whole movie right there. If you buy that line, you’re in.

Righteous Kill Trailer