Killing Them Softly
Director: Andrew Dominik
Cast: Brad Pitt, Richard Jenkins, Ray Liotta, and James Gandolfini.
Rated R for violence, sexual references, pervasive language, and some drug use
A movie about Brad Pitt as a hitman for the mob? What can be wrong with that? Well, unfortunately a lot. Brad Pitt reteams with The Assassination of Jesse James director, Andrew Dominik, to tell a dark tale about a hitman who goes after those responsible for robbing a mafia-run poker game. The film starts off with a gritty intensity that only diminishes the more that time passes. The movie clocks in under two hours, but it will have felt like three hours by the time it's over.
The plot is fairly straight forward. Two criminal lowlifes decide to take a job that involves knocking off a poker game that is hosted by the mob. Their thinking is that Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta) will get the blame since he was stupid enough to rob one of his own poker games once before. Here is one of the problems with the movie: these two idiots and also the filmmakers should know that if someone crosses the mob then A) there is never just one person who will take the blame, and B) even if there is only one person involved, the mob will go after anyone they think could have been involved. This rule is completely ignored by both the characters and the filmmakers. They all should know better.
So, they rob the poker game. Markie gets taken out like they thought, but the mob doesn't stop with him. Jackie (Brad Pitt) hires James Gandolfini from New York to come help him take out the man who arranged the heist as well as the two fools who pulled it off. The plot should never have happened because who is stupid enough to try to rob a mafia poker game? Nonetheless, Brad Pitt is ice cold as the mafia's go-to hitman and his best scenes are with the always great James Gandolfini. Besides that, there is a lot of dialogue that starts out clever, but ventures into a dull wasteland leaving the audience wondering, "who cares?". The movie is filmed with a gritty realism with the exception of a scene that involves a slow-motion murder that seems to have come straight from the film 300.
Brad Pitt is always solid, but he deserves better than this. He deserves to be in a crime movie like The Town or The Departed (which he produced, coincidentally). I'd love to see him in a similar role alongside Jeremy Renner, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Tom Hardy, and directed by either Martin Scorcese or Ben Affleck. That's all I kept thinking about during Killing Them Softly, but sadly I was stuck watching a bore of a movie.
RATING: C-
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