It is 2008 things are tough at all angles. Remnants of the bubble are strewn across the country and the loud clap from the burst is still ringing in everyone’s ears. The Wall Street suits are lining up for the handouts and the folks on Main Street are sharpening their fingers so that they can laser beam the blame to all and everyone but themselves. But what about the fellas on the wrong side of the tracks? “Killing Them Softly” makes a case that even crime is not recession proof and that it’s hard to get paid proper for a hit when the economy is quivering in the corner.
Director Andrew Dominick has given us an honest and often hilarious look at the criminal lifestyle here that plays like an American companion piece to his near-perfect directorial debut “Chopper” (2000). In “Killing Them Softly” hooligans sit around and talk more than play shoot’em up. The film has a touch of Tarantino to it but the dialogue is more casual here, more real than Tarantino’s ultra-stylized writing. Also “Reservoir Dogs” an “Jackie Brown” featured highly intelligent criminals (nearly all of Quentin’s characters border on genius or at least sound like one) while “Killing Them Softly” focuses on a crew of dim bulbs running around New Orleans slaying each other.
In fact the entire film is populated with idiots with the exception of Jackie (Brad Pitt). He is the man the Mob calls in when something needs cleaning up and he is quick to assess and scrub. A pair of thugs has knocked off a protected card game and the local criminal economy is shattered. Money was already tight and now no one wants to gamble away what they have left. Jackie finds the morons without much issue (one of them smuggles dogs and has a smack habit which causes loose lips) and sets off a plan to “fix” the situation.
“Killing Them Softly” may focus on the low intelligent but the script is whip-smart. Based on the George V. Higgins 1974 novel “Cogan’s Trade,” Dominick has adapted the source material and given us something to chew on with great characters. By setting the action during the beginning of the fiscal crisis, it’s easy to question how these bad guys are not much different from the crooks that caused the fall. Weren’t they manipulating the system? Weren’t they playing a protected card game and gambling with money that didn’t belong to them? Difference is the “real” crooks can’t get a bail out and that makes them desperate.
Pitt commands the film as Jackie and is believable. He manipulates the world around him and sees thing the way they are. It is easy to forget that he is a murderer but the film features an amazing death scene shot in slow motion that reminds us that we are talking about the ending of life with a nonchalant ease. Pitt has a killer monologue at the last minutes of the film that will go down as classic. While “Killing Them Softly” features many fleshed out characters (Scoot McNairy is fantastic) no one touches James Gandolfini as Mickey, an alcoholic hitman who sits around and reminisces about his past mistakes with a paranoid edge to every sentence. The performance is a stunner.
“Killing Them Softly” is a tight and solid movie that has no fat, no wasted time to it. As America is slowly pulling out of the financial decline, it is interesting to look back only four years ago and identify the time as the misguided past when we were all a bunch of idiots fighting over scraps.