Release Date: November 30th, 2012
MPAA Rating: R
Director: Andrew Dominik
Film Pulse Score: 6/10
Killing Them Softly is the film adaptation of George V. Higgins’s crime novel Cogan’s Trade from 1974. Whereas the novel deals with the criminal underworld of Boston, the film takes place in post-Katrina New Orleans during the run-up to the 2008 election. Killing Them Softly is New Zealand-born director Andrew Dominik’s third film, the first since his critically well-received The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. This film, much like The Assassination of…, features gorgeous cinematography (Greig Fraser), nice camerawork and solid performances from its actors, the only difference being Killing Them Softly doesn’t live up to its potential; it looks beautiful but lacks depth. To say that it is not a fully realized film would be an understatement.
The plot is fairly simple and easy to follow: Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta) runs some underground card games for the Mob when one night his game gets hit by two gunmen. The card games are shut down for a while causing the Mob to continue to lose money – something the Mob doesn’t like. With the passage of time, the games start up again and one night (after a bit of drinking) Markie admits that he is the one that knocked over his own card game – something that he finds so hilarious he can barely announce it. Word gets out and three low-level criminals decide to knock over a Markie Trattman card game because…why not? The mob is just going to think that was Markie again and the other three will get off scot-free. So Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) rob the card game with dish gloves and a ridiculously sawed-off shotgun.
To deal with the aftermath, Mob spokesman/assistant/concierge/or whatever the hell he is, played by Richard Jenkins, has to call in Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) to find out who did it and then, of course, to eliminate them. For the most part everything in the film is going smoothly at this point – that is until Jackie brings in New York Mickey (James Gandolfini). Mickey has to whack one of the guys because he knows Jackie and Jackie likes to kill people softly (without all of the embarrassing begging and crying). The injection of Mickey into the story brings this film to a screeching halt – he serves almost no purpose, but dominates certain scenes, alluding to his having a purpose. He talks about the problems in his life and the good ol’ days (at length mind you) with such familiarity that the viewer wonders if something was missed.
The rest of the film plays out almost exactly the way one would think. Most viewers, if not all, have seen this film before but probably done much better – story-wise. The cinematography on the other hand is magnificent – a mixture of well-framed slow-motion, inventive fixed camera positions and a few well placed tracking shots which further goes to show that this film had so much potential. A scene involving two thugs roughing up Markie Trattman in the rain is so well shot that it teeters on perfection, but for every beautifully shot scene there are two more that seem to unnecessarily drag on for entirely too long. The only other really memorable item from Killing Them Softly one is able to glean is Scoot McNairy’s fantastic performance as Frankie, the low-level criminal tasked with knocking over the card game and subsequently dealing with the ramifications – namely, Jackie Cogan.
The most bothersome part of Killing Them Softly has to be the strained and often heavy-handed correlation Dominik insists on making between the bloated, bureaucratic wastefulness of the Mob to bloated, bureaucratic wastefulness of the American government. Throughout the film, snippets of Obama speeches, George W. Bush, CNN and talk radio are played incessantly, to the point that it seems Dominik wanted to make an entirely different film delving into politics and fiscal issues, but was forced to tell a story about the Mob and its hitman.
Killing Them Softly is, on one hand, a beautifully shot film featuring some good performances, especially Scoot McNairy, and on the other, a poorly crafted story featuring extremely inconsistent pacing topped off with a weak, but heavy-handed, political metaphor. Not to mention the utter lack of completion the film gives off; I was left with the feeling that I walked into the film halfway through missing a large, important chunk of the film, but alas, I saw the whole thing. There was so much potential, so much promise, but in the end there was nothing more than what amounts to a rough draft to a good, if not great, film we will never get to see.
Kevin nails the problem when he sums it up as a “rough draft” — it was that, and it was rougher rather than smoother. It is easily one of my least-enjoyable viewing experiences of 2012.