'Righteous Kill' (R)(out of four)

If not for the acting chops of film veterans Robert De Niro and Al Pacino all would be lost in "Righteous Kill."

You can almost see through De Niro's and Pacino's aging faces telling moviegoers that they really wished they had teamed up for something with substance.

It's really the script that will leave you longing for the days when De Niro and Pacino were able to light up the screen in 1995's "Heat." But it isn't that the duo was 13 years younger; it's that there was meat on that script's bones that they could really sink their teeth into. "Righteous Kill" makes a lot of wrong moves and our talented dashing duo gets caught in the middle. They strain to do the best job they can, just like we've come to expect, but moviegoers feel their pain.

Better suited for a cable television episode of "The Closer," Russell Gewirtz ("Inside Man") tells the story of two veteran New York Police Department police officers who, between the two of them, have been on the force more than 100 years.

De Niro is Turk, a hotheaded tough guy who is virile enough to have an erotic sex life with young Detective Karen Corelli (Carla Gugino) and soft enough to coach a girl's softball team. Turk hates the injustice of so-called fair trials where child killers and rapists get set free, and drug dealers are able to use laundered money to open million-dollar nightclubs in New York City. He makes no bones about the way he feels.

His partner, Rooster (Pacino), has become just as jaded, but is a bit more low-key about it. He chalks it up to the daily grind of police work and to a career he chose rather than one where he'd be required to wear a hard hat.

Turk and Rooster find themselves investigating a poetry-writing serial killer who goes after bad guys after the justice system has failed to right their wrongs. While the two want to cheer the demise of the lowlifes who shouldn't have been able to walk free, they know that it is their job to track down the vigilante who has taken matters into his own hands.

When a couple of young cops (Donnie Wahlberg and John Leguizamo) are assigned to the case, too, a series of cat and mouse games begin that are so convoluted you start to believe that the real crime here is that Pacino and De Niro wasted their valuable talent and time to actually allow the whole mess to play out. Oh, and did we say the two new kids on the block believe that the serial killer is probably a cop -- "one of their own?"

With De Niro and Pacino doling out jokes about a dead guy whose name is Bobby Brady and dissecting whether "Underdog" was actually popping pills to save the day, you have to believe that the only reason the two signed on for this dead-on-arrival, lame police caper was to have the chance to work together. And those are really the choicest moments of the film, when the two Hollywood giants kick back together and the chemistry flies.

If you can bypass "Righteous Kill's" weaknesses and realize that its strength lies in watching two greats who have 15 Academy Award nominations between them and three wins, you'll spend 100 worthwhile minutes at the movie theater. But if you'd rather see a film with these two great actors playing out a script with some serious punch, forego "Kill" and rent Michael Mann's "Heat." Now that's a crime drama with some spark.