De Niro. Pacino. One name, and everybody knows who you're talking about, like Spielberg. Or Elvis.

It's been thirteen years since the two legends shared the screen in Heat, but that was the first and only time, and they only appeared together in two scenes. (They were both in The Godfather, Part II, but their characters never met.) Now, the grand dukes of Italian wise guys are finally being reunited on screen in Righteous Kill. But is it too late to capture the magic?

De Niro and Pacino play New York City cops on the trail of a serial killer who may be a former policeman. The trailer shows De Niro chewing up the place just like we pay to see, calling people "fu*%in' mutts" and starting bench clears at softball games. Pacino plays good cop (or more likely, slightly less bad cop), and they both shoot loads of guns. Sounds good so far.

The script was written by the guy who wrote Inside Man, a tight thriller about a bank job turned hostage standoff. But director Jon Avnet is an odd fit. His directorial debut was Fried Green Tomatoes, which didn't exactly scream "badass action," then The Mighty Ducks. Hmm. His most recent, 88 Minutes, also starred Al Pacino, as a psychiatrist on the run from a serial killer. It got destroyed when it came out in April, getting a 6% on Rotten Tomatoes. (Oddly enough, its running time was 107 minutes. Maybe that was the problem.)

Pacino's been uneven in recent years. He won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for Angels in America, but he was also in Gigli. And S1m0ne. And People I Know. (And let's just forget that whole "hoo-ah!" business, Oscar be damned.) It's been a while since De Niro's last big dramatic smash, too. He appeared in and directed the decent The Good Shepherd, but has mostly focused on comedy roles in movies like Meet the Fockers and Analyze This.

The rest of the cast is a toss-up: Donnie Wahlberg was great in Band of Brothers and Boomtown, but he keeps showing up in those Saw movies. Curtis Jackson, otherwise known as 50 Cent (or "Bus Fare" around the neighborhood) was pretty respectable in Get Rich or Die Tryin', but there's no avoiding the gimmick factor of casting a rapper. Carla Gugino's usually pretty good; John Leguizamo's usually unwatchable. For every positive, there's a negative lurking right there like a vulture.

Best case, this is Heat with tons of shared screen time, two greats finally together in a tough-talking cop drama that lets them play off each other. Worst case: The Score crossed with The Recruit. What, you've never heard of those? See what I'm getting at?

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