Rent Killing Them Softly (2012)

Absolutely Superb - Killing Them Softly review by GI

A slick crime thriller with a highly stylised narrative and a sharp condemnation of American corporate politics and business. Brad Pitt is super cool as Jackie, a mob enforcer, sent to find out who robbed a mob controlled card game. Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn on fine form as two of the hapless junkies who think they've got away with it, Ray Liotta as the mob guy who runs the card game, Richard Jenkins and a couple of great cameos from James Gandolfini and Sam Shepard to add icing to the cake. Some may find this a little too slow and talky for their taste but this is a first rate film and when the violence comes it's shocking and realistic. Director Andrew Dominik, who also wrote the screenplay, certainly has a talent for gritty realism and whilst his output, so far, has been sparse he is certainly a director to watch out for. This is a modern crime film that deserves a rest evaluation. Highly recommended.

A really nasty little film with stupid plot & idiotic scenarios, wasting the talents of all involved - Killing Them Softly review by TB

Some films you watch are bad. They have all the right ingredients, but they totally fail in every way. And when they also have a cast that should guarantee an amazing movie, it makes it all the more puzzling. But then there are films like Killing Them Softly, which are not only bad, but also aggressively nasty alongside that.

Brad Pitt stars as Jackie Coogan, a mob enforcer who is brought in to investigate a mafia card game that was robbed. Suspicion has fallen onto Markie Trattman, the organiser of the game, who previously set up a robbery of one of his games & confessed to it, somehow earning a pass from the very people who he robbed. Coogan immediately sees that this robbery was committed due to the suspicion that would fall onto Trattman again, so he sets out to take down the actual perpetrators, enlisting the help of Mickey Fallon, a once-legendary but now alcoholic & on-parole hitman.

From the opening moments, this film grates. It is clearly setting itself up as a comment on/critique of the state of the USA/World economy, but the way it does this is literally by repeatedly hitting you over the head with its messages. It also features some of the most badly written & unpleasant characters imaginable, but ones who are literally in no way relatable or believable.

Take Markie Trattman for example: the film invites us to buy into the fact that he is buried in deep within the mob, running highly sensitive card games where hundreds of thousands of dollars are involved/exchanged. We are then shown him staging a robbery, pocketing the money, getting drunk & casually telling these gangsters that he did them over, laughing in their faces. And instead of being put against a wall & shot, they give him a free pass & allow him to keep running the games... This literally would not happen, in any way, in any universe.

But nothing comes as close to sheer stupidity as Mickey Fallon. Once a legendary, celebrated hitman, he is now nothing more than a ridiculous caricature: pathetic, addicted to drugs and alcohol & useless. He has been arrested & bailed, but Coogan is absolutely adamant that, despite the baggage & warnings from others not to go near him, that Fallon is the only one to do the mob hits. Fallon then blows off the job, checks into a hotel room, orders prostitutes & drugs, drawing as much attention to himself as is physically possible, despite the fact he's meant to be a world-class hitman, as well as violating his parole. And the film wants us to accept at face value that anyone from the mafia would have anything to do with or be within 100 miles of someone who is this much of a liability...

The other thing this film has which is not only unpleasant, but also totally out of place, is several scenes of unbelievably graphic & nasty violence. None of it fits within the story and seems to have been put in simply to shock & get a visceral reaction from the audience. For me, it actually was just horrible & fairly repellent, like the rest of the film.

Nothing works, is believable or watchable. It is a movie filled with horrible horrible people doing horrible horrible things to each other, without any reason to exist or deserve your attention.

Avoid.