De Niro and Pacino go for Righteous Kill
Andrew Gumbel

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino will be appearing in the same movie for the third time in their fabled careers. The two veteran actors will team up as cops chasing a serial killer in Righteous Kill, a film being produced and directed by Jon Avnet. The film will shoot in Connecticut and New York in late summer and will presumably be released sometime in 2008.

It will be the first time the two men have shared top billing since Michael Mann’s 1995 thriller Heat, in which De Niro played a master criminal and Pacino the sharp cop who tracks him down. Intriguingly, they shared just two scenes in that movie, one an off-the-record encounter in a coffee shop and the other during the final showdown.

Al Pacino

Before that, they were both in the cast of Godfather II, when Pacino played the grown Michael Corleone and De Niro played his father, Vito, as a young man. Because they were acting in different time periods they not only shared no screen time, but barely saw each other on the set.

The two men are friends and, according to a report in Variety, the new project stemmed from their desire to work together again. This time, they will be on screen together for most of the movie.

Both could use a shot in the arm following a number of middling-to-fallow years. De Niro has tried to reinvent himself as a comic actor, with debatable results. Pacino, meanwhile, hasn’t had a high-profile leading film role since Simone and Insomnia in 2001 and no bona fide critical or commercial success since The Insider in 1999.

— The Independent