Robert De Niro + Al Pacino = pure chemistry

Rating: 9/10 (29 January 2005)

I don't really know why I even bother writing a review on this movie. If you know that Robert De Niro and Al Pacino are playing in it, there is almost no doubt this must be a very good movie. Even though all the actors did a very good job, it is the interaction between De Niro as the robber and Al Pacino as the police officer that makes this movie really work. There can be no doubt about the fact that these two men have lifted this movie to a level that it would never have gotten to if they weren't in it. It's by far the best cop-robber movie I've ever seen.
What I loved so much about this movie was the realism and the fact that the story and the characters were more important than the action shots. If this had been a movie with for instance Bruce Willis (I'm not even talking about Jean-Claude Van Damme, Sylvester Stallone,...), this movie would have been full of explosions, fighting and shooting and it would have lost all its power. But not with these two fine actors in it. OK, there is sometimes a lot of shooting, but when a car gets hit by a bullet, it doesn't just explode and fly through the air like you see in most movies; when they meet, they don't just start kicking each other...
The fact that you really get to know both men, during their work as well as in their private lives, makes this movie different from others. They aren't always the guys whose lives are perfect; who get whatever they like, just by blinking with their eyes; they even show real emotions... That just adds to the believability and that's exactly why I like this movie so much.
There will always be people who won't like this movie, for whatever reason, but personally I think this is one of the few movies in this genre that are actually worth a second and a third watch. I've always been a fan of De Niro and Pacino and what they did here was pure chemistry. I give it an 8.5/10