The horrendous Robert De Niro movie Roger Ebert adored: “Why shouldn’t he get his own turn?”
It’s easy to see why Robert De Niro and Al Pacino have been inextricably linked since the 1970s, with the two acting heavyweights having plenty in common.
They’re both New York natives of Italian descent, separated in age by three years, and they both began their careers in the late 1960s before using the following decade – which included at least one Godfather movie – to establish themselves as two of their era’s most exciting and gifted talents.
De Niro and Pacino are living legends, icons, Academy Award winners, and esteemed veterans boasting a filmography filled with many of the greatest movies ever made. Having spent decades in each other’s orbit, it only seemed natural that they would develop a sudden habit of making terrible films around the same time.
The former does at least have an excuse, with Pacino admitting the reason he signed on for so many shitty flicks was that he was broke and needed the money, even if he tried to paint himself as a sadist who intentionally selected poor scripts to try and elevate something awful into something mediocre.
The latter, meanwhile, can’t say the same. While De Niro has remained capable of delivering the odd knockout turn, his 21st-century output has become alarmingly overpopulated with unmitigated disasters like Godsend, The Big Wedding, Killing Season, Dirty Grandpa, The Bag Man, Hide and Seek, and, of course, Righteous Kill opposite Pacino.
After a stellar 1990s that yielded Goodfellas, Awakenings, This Boy’s Life, Casino, Heat, Cop Land, Jackie Brown, Ronin, and Analyze This, De Niro kicked off the new millennium with a truly woeful picture: the live-action/animation hybrid, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.
It was almost tragic to see De Niro imitating his iconic Taxi Driver speech while sporting an eye patch and hamming it up for the cheap seats as Fearless Leader in a Razzie-nominated and relentlessly unfunny comedy that cratered at the box office after failing to recoup even half of its pricey $75 million budget. Some people liked the film, though, and one of its most unexpected defenders was Roger Ebert.
“There’s a word for this movie, and that word is jolly,” he wrote in his review. He wasn’t expecting high art, and he inevitably didn’t get it, but Ebert nonetheless praised The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle for its “mixture of dumb puns, corny sight gags and sly, even sophisticated in-jokes.” He even made a point of praising De Niro, insisting that he’d earned the right to poke fun at his most famous roles.
“It’s the sort of movie where De Niro parodies his famous ‘Are you talking to me?’ speech with such good-natured fun that instead of groaning, we reflect: well, everyone else has ripped it off, so why shouldn’t he get his own turn?” he mused, even though it’s more cringeworthy than anything else.
Even bad movies need people who love them, and for one that instantly took its place on the bottom rung of De Niro’s career ladder, he had a famous defender in Ebert.
