It was billed as an entertainment nirvana of sorts, somewhere on par with Page and Plant getting Led Zeppelin back together for a full-on tour, or Mr. Rogers returning to the neighborhood, beloved sweater vest in tow. In all their years of starring in a slew of legendary films, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino have appeared onscreen together exactly one time — in an all-too-fleeting diner scene in 1995's "Heat."

In that crime drama, the Hollywood Hall of Famers were on opposite sides of the law. In "Righteous Kill" (released this week on DVD), the senior citizen versions of De Niro and Pacino are wearing the same NYPD badges.

The longtime partners are detectives Turk (De Niro) and Rooster (Pacino), grizzly, jaded vets of the force on the heels of a serial killer with a penchant for leaving poetry at the crime scenes. Interspersed with the murders are shots of a videotaped Turk talking about the shootings in a matter-of-fact, this-is-why-I-did-it type of manner. "Most people respect the badge. Everybody respects the gun," Turk says into the camera.

Hmm, something's up here.

It's not long before another pair of detectives, played by John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg, suggest that Turk (the first to say the serial killer may in fact be one of New York's finest) may be the culprit. With the videotaped segments of Turk saying as much, we're led to believe this may not be all that far out of the question.

Enough with the plot, however. The main draw here, of course, is De Niro and Pacino, two of their generation's finest actors, on screen together, playing off each other for the second time in cinematic history.

Although Pacino's resume is obviously padded with some extraordinary work, De Niro would have to be considered (at least if you asked this reviewer) the better, more commanding actor of the two. His work rivals almost anyone, in any time period.

But no matter how much you liked him in the likes of "The Godfather: Part II," this is a different De Niro. Not a bad one, per se, but a different one. Due to his more recent work in the comedy realm, I kept waiting for Ben Stiller to jump out into a dark alley and De Niro to ask him if he could milk him, a la "Meet the Parents."

(No such scene ever occurs in "Righteous Kill," for those keeping score at home.)

The overdue pairing of De Niro, 65, and Pacino, 68, does come a couple (maybe three, to be more honest) decades too late to be as powerful as it could have been, but it's still pretty entertaining stuff. As it tends to do, time has taken a toll on the men themselves and their presence on the screen, but making a violent, crime drama has to be a little like riding a bike. You don't forget how to speak in a gruff voice and use a barrage of four-letter words, after all, and the two screen veterans seem comfortable with what they're asked to do here.

The main problem here is that what they're asked to do is fairly B-list stuff for a couple of legends.

Phil Jackson didn't put in Michael Jordan when the Bulls were up by 26 points with 1:14 to go in the fourth during their legendary run in the mid-1990s, and these two could have benefited from a story that wasn't in the "paint-by-numbers crime drama" section of the stories Hollywood has to tell.

The "something's up" I alluded to earlier isn't all that tough to figure out, at least to some degree, and the inclusion of Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson as a drug dealing club owner fails to bring any legitimacy to the party. Director Jon Avnet, who directed Pacino in 2007's forgettable "88 Minutes," was likely out of his element here, too (his previous most notable directing performance was "Fried Green Tomatoes.")

Is watching a couple of screen legends spar back and forth over a mostly generic crime story better than watching any Tom, Dick and Harry spar back and forth over a mostly generic crime story? Duh.

But it's no Page and Plant onstage together in 1977 before a record-breaking audience at the Pontiac Silverdome in Michigan, either.

Joel Sensenig is news editor of the Review Times.