“America’s not a country, it’s a business. Now f**king pay me.” These aren’t just stand-out lines from this stark, bitterly funny, savagely cynical crime drama; they’re its mission statement. In 2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, producer-star Brad Pitt and writer-director Andrew Dominik took down a national icon; this time, it’s the whole damn nation.
Crime movies from Point Blank to The Godfather to Casino have often proved adept critiques of capitalism: The Firm as the firm, where getting fired is more literal – and terminal – than mere redundancy, but usually it’s subtext. Killing Them Softly, subtle as a Wall Street crash, makes this subtext its actual text. Bar TVs and car radios constantly trumpet reports of the financial crisis and the pieties of politicians on damage limitation. At times Obama and Bush seem to have as many lines as Pitt.
All this commentary does serve a purpose though: as the politicos desperately try to reassure the public that they’re cleaning up the mess, so too is Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) in his own low-rent criminal underworld. Cogan’s a slick enforcer brought in to fix a card game robbery screwed up by a whiny dropout (Scoot McNairy) and Aussie smackhead (Ben Mendlesohn). The game manager (Ray Liotta) is innocent, and yet, due to a former scam, he also needs to be reined in. There’s a major recession. Everybody’s downsizing, only some won’t ever be getting up again. It’s the economy, stupid. With bullets.
Dominik has updated and switched George V Higgins’ 1974 Boston-set novel Cogan’s Trade, to busted flush New Orleans 2008 and it’s a smart trade off: post-Katrina, pre-Obama in the White House and slam bang in the eye of the economic hurricane. What he’s kept is huge swathes of tough guy talk. The film is largely a roundabout series of intense, rambling duologues, a virtually all-male cast bartering back and forth over deals, services rendered, what they’re owed from life – and whether they’re even owed a life at all.
So there’s Pitt vs. James Gandolfini as a killer over the hill and saddled with addictions; Pitt vs. Richard Jenkins, an exasperated middle manager overseeing the hits; McNairy vs. both Mendlesohn and Sopranos alumnus Vincent Curatola’s third hapless thief. The lengthy back-and-forths are an actor’s wet dream, spiked with profane, spiky one-liners and every one of the superb ensemble rises to the occasion.
The film’s title comes from Cogan’s preferred method of dispatching his victims – from a distance, without messy emotions, avoiding suffering as much as possible, for both him and his quarry. Not that Dominik shares this reticence, giving us key scenes of vicious, stylized action. Most notable is a drive-by hit sequence that’s a slow-motion marvel, a symphony of shattered glass, dancing bullet cases and exploding drops of rain and blood.
There’s nothing soft, then, about the muscular filmmaking. From its aggressive, static-warped, cut-up credit sequence onwards, Killing Them Softly’s a film that wants you to know it’s being Directed with a capital D. What’s unusual is where it throws its focus. You’re as liable to get an extended, woozy drug addiction scene, with camera and audio constantly fading in and out alongside Mendlesohn’s floating consciousness, as you are a fleeting glimpse of a supposedly major player (a blink-and-miss-him Sam Shepard). You’ll listen to a major, tortured discussion of a character’s fate, then never see the end results. It both keeps you on your toes and, occasionally, tries your patience.
As does the sledgehammer approach. Many will find the constant economic griping hard to take, though for me, far more irritating is the CAPS LOCK soundtrack. Pitt eventually arrives, dressed in black, to Johnny Cash’s ‘The Man Comes Around’. The aforementioned drug scene is scored to ‘Heroin’ – a move so bleedin’ obvious it should deemed a Class A cinematic offence.
Nobody, though, can deny Dominik, Pitt and co have the courage of their convictions, and ultimately this unapologetic relentlessness powers the film. There were obvious ways to go: a pop culture-soaked Tarantino knock-off; a kinetic, sweeping Scorsese homage to Goodfellas; po-faced Michael Mann-erisms with the weight of the world on its shoulders.
Killing Them Softly neatly sidesteps all of these, suffusing a low-key disorganized crime story with its own brutal poetry, off-kilter rhythms and knockout performances. It’s a film that reflects its characters’ social and economic weariness and uncertainty but bites back, albeit with the blackest humour and bleakest worldview. Nice work if you can get it. And for the Dominik-Pitt merger, at least, business is booming.
Source : http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/05/25/killing-them-softly-review
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