Just over 4 years ago I wrote an article here on The Movie Blog stating that actors Al Pacino and Robert De Niro were, at the time, overrated actors and did not deserve to be mentioned in any conversation about the best actors working today. You can imagine the stir that caused. I was called crazy, insane, stupid… and that I had no taste or knew anything about film. Keep in mind that I was NOT saying their careers were overrated. It’s impossible to overrate the careers of these two giants… careers that my never be matched in our lifetimes. No, my point was that where the two of them are RIGHT NOW as actors was overrated.
Many people still believe that because of past brilliance, that means they’re every bit as brilliant and talented today. My point was that this is not true. The sad reality is that neither Robert De Niro or Al Pacino have the chops, wisdom, passion or drive that it takes to be one of the best actors on the planet any longer. Those days are gone and the two are sadly now just hollow shells of what they used to be.
10 years ago, could you have ever imagined the possibility that Robert De Niro would make a film and NO ONE wanted to pick it up? Well, that’s what just happened at Sundance this year. De Niro’s film “What Just Happened?” played at Sundance, and no studio or distributor even gave the movie a sniff. Who could have ever imagined that? Well… today it’s not surprising in the least.
Even Francis Ford Coppola came out last year and bashed the two titans of the acting world. The hard reality is this, aside from 1 brilliant performance by Pacino in the small film “The Merchant of Venice” a couple of years ago, the two of them have done basically nothing but crap, and turned in crap performances in the last 12-13 years:
– City by the Sea (De Niro)
– Gigli (Pacino)
– Showtime (De Niro)De Niro
– The Recruit (Pacino)
– Analyze That (De Niro)
– Sim0ne (Oh gag) (Pacino)
– The Good Shepherd (De Niro)
– Two for the Money (Pacino)
– The Score (De Niro)
– 15 Minutes (gag gag gag) (De Niro)
– 88 Minutes (That’s 73 minutes more that Robert and one of the worst films ever) (Pacino)
– Hide and Seek (De Niro)
– Meet the Fockers (De Niro)
You may not think all those movies are crap… you might even have the opinion that a couple of them are pretty good, but there’s no denying that the days of The Godfather, Scarface, Goodfellas, Raging Bull et. et. et. are miles ahead of any of the movies listed above.
Now, others are starting to point out the sad state of the careers of these two, possibly greatest of all time, actors. The other day the LA Times ran an article titled: “Pacino and De Niro: How the mighty have fallen“. Here are some of the excerpts from that article:
The two icons of ’70s New Hollywood, heroes to a generation of young actors and filmmakers, have become parodies of themselves, making payday movies and turning in performances that are hollow echoes of the electrically charged work they did in such films as “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver.”
Not every aging actor in Hollywood has to embarrass himself. While Pacino and De Niro grab the dough, working for hacks and nonentities, Nicholson, with rare exception, has picked his spots, doing movies with Martin Scorsese, Alexander Payne and Sean Penn. Clint Eastwood, who’s even older than Nicholson, has remained an iconic figure by working with the best director of all — himself.
Here’s the sad part… as bad as things are right now, they’re about to get a whole lot worse. “Righteous Kill” is on the way.
The news of Righteous Kill was greeted with great excitement from the movie fan community. Finally, a film with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro together at last (they really only had 1 scene together in Heat and were never on screen together in Godfather 2)! Even I, who had lost most of my faith in the two, was pumped up about it. But that excitement quickly got a reality check about where these two actors are at when it was announced they added 50 Cent to the movie as well. A collective “What The Hell?!?!” could be heard around the websphere.
Oh, and the same director of 88 Minutes (which has a rating of 06% on Rotten Tomatoes and 17% on Metacritic), Jon Avnet, is the director of Righteous Kill… so any hope we may have been vainly grasping onto for this movie has officially been flushed down the toilet.
Yes, times have changed. There was a time when anything with either of these two legends in it would instantly get people’s attention… now it feels like their presence in a movie is actually a negative and causes some people to LOSE interest. Never thought this day would come.
So what are we saying? Are we claiming De Niro and Pacino are completely washed up and incapable of ever doing anything of value again? Not really… I think The Merchant of Venice showed us that Pacino can still pull out a great performance once in a while… but for the most part the magic seems to be gone, and what I said 4 years ago (that neither one of these guys deserves to be mentioned in any discussion about the best actors working today) is even more true today. Such a shame.
