"Killing Them Softly" is a curiously dead movie and I don't mean that as a pun. It never really gets off the ground and is strangely flat in spite of a generally excellent cast and a premise brimming with tough guy possibilities.
Its storyline about some not ready for prime time hoods resembles "The Sopranos" and that resemblance is aided and abetted by the cast which includes James Gandolfini and Vincent ‘Johnny Sack’ Curatola. The resemblances, however, stop there. While The Sopranos benefited from top-notch writing, "Killing Them Softly" seems like it was penned by someone who'd watched a couple of Sopranos episodes and said "I could do that." Unfortunately, you can't.
As mentioned, the story revolves around some small time hoods who decide to rob a mob card game to raise some easy money. The mastermind of the plot, a dry cleaner nicknamed "the Squirrel" (the aforementioned Vincent Curatola), thinks he's discovered a fail safe that will allow him and his co-conspirators to get away scott free. That fail safe is Ray Liotta's Markie Trattman, the hood who runs the game. He had the nerve to rip off his own game years earlier and then, when things had settled down, he bragged about it. Because of that the squirrel has deduced that if someone were to rob his game now the mob would immediately point the finger at Markie.
Secure in their iron clad logic the Squirrel, Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and his friend Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) go ahead and hold up the joint. As expected they get away but their robbery triggers the intervention of Brad Pitt's Jackie, a mid-level enforcer who's smart enough to know that Markie's compromised status was ripe for exploitation. This is really where the film's problems become obvious because Pitt's performance is all over the place. At one moment he seems to be playing Jackie as a kind of fish out of water, reluctant to bring the rain or stand up for himself and what he knows needs to be done. At another moment he's stone cold enough to blow a guy's head off without blinking an eye. So who is Jackie? The timid, easily spooked fish out of water reluctant to hit someone he knows because it might get emotionally messy, or the hard-nosed, no-nonsense, grizzled professional who'll be reassuring you everything's okay while he's calmly chambering a round? It's a problem because from the moment Pitt comes into frame for the first time he's the center of the film and if the center is wobbling the whole film is in trouble.
By contrast James Gandolfini plays another hit man Jackie employs to help him take out the three crooks. But Gandolfini's Mickey is a mess himself. He's been pinched for carrying an unregistered shotgun and has to jump bail to help Pitt with his hits. At the same time his marriage is falling apart and all he can think to do is drink and screw hookers round the clock in an effort to kill his feelings.
His character, especially during those scenes where he's abusing the help, oozes the kind of dread I imagine Jackie was intended to have. Perhaps it was just a matter of Gandolfini having so much more experience than Pitt exploring the mob psyche but the contrast was at times startling when the two were on the screen together. That's unfortunate for Pitt but fortunate for the film which desperately needed something to lift it off the floor.
The rest of the cast doesn't have much to work with. Ray Liotta does his best Ray-Liotta-doing-Henry-Hill-in-Goodfellas impression and it's good enough to not be a distraction but that's about it.
Curiously, the film makers seem to be trying to draw parallels between events unfolding in the film's forefront and the running background narrative of the 2008 financial meltdown and presidential election. Perhaps if the primary narrative were more coherently developed those parallels would be easier to understand. As it is this background layer does little more than reinforce the enervating atmosphere and provide Pitt with an excuse for some tough guy dialogue at the very end.
As I said earlier poor writing is largely to blame for this promising but ultimately unfulfilling miss. But a weak script isn't the whole story. The director doesn't seem to know what to do with his characters either and at times it almost seems the actors are directing themselves. While I'm sure Andrew Dominik is a champion human being I'm also 100% sure he's no Scorcese though his film tries desperately to conjure the spirit of the master (right down to eschewing a score in favor of various minor and major hits from the past to help set the mood).
While weak writing and directing are understandable enough there was one element of the production that I just didn't get at all. That was the ultra-stylized way some of the most grievously violent scenes were handled. The film would be droning along for 20 minutes or so when suddenly a very carefully crafted, super-slo-mo shot of a bullet creating a fountain of bloody tissue and bone fragments will appear... and then the droning would resume. WTF?
Killing Them Softly has reportedly had its US release timed to maximize its awards potential. I don't know why they bothered.
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