Killing Them Softly - Review

Starring: Brad Pitt
Writer/Director: Andrew Dominik
Runtime: 97 minutes

• Good performances
• Too much talk
• Good premise wasted
• Tin eared economic theme

Killing Them Softly is a gangster movie which squanders a plausible premise and becomes boring pretty quickly. It asks you to emotionally invest in several characters who aren't very interesting, and it has a strange political subplot starring George W. Bush and Barack Obama in footage from the 2008 presidential election.

Bear with.

The story starts out with three men plotting to knock over a card game run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta). Some time in the past, Trattman admittedly staged a robbery of his own card game. He lived to laugh about it. The thinking now goes that if his card game is hit again, Trattman will be blamed for it and take the fall, likely with a bullet in his head.

This logic proves mistaken, as the mysterious syndicate who oversees these card games sends Jackie (Brad Pitt) in to investigate the latest robbery. Jackie draws the conclusion that it doesn't matter if Trattman did it or not. Everybody who might be involved should be rubbed out.

Sounds like a nice set up, doesn't it? Fairly straightforward, with lots of room for double crosses, shoot outs, and all of that good stuff that makes a gangster movie entertaining. Except this movie forgets about entertainment value, and instead spends too long teaching us why we should care about these characters, and letting them talk. And talk. And talk.

The yakkety-yak scenes in this movie goes on forever, and they aren't nearly interesting enough to make it worthwhile. I found myself asking, "Who gives a damn?" more than a couple of times. James Gandolfini makes an appearance in this flick as a hitman with a conscience and he refuses to shut up about the problems he's having with his wife. He goes on in great, obscenity-laced detail about how horrible his life is. Even Brad Pitt looks like he's had enough. One scene begets another of Gandolfini bitching about his wife, his possible jail term, his drinking, his lousy hookers. After a while, you wish he'd put a hit on himself and end it already.

The political angle of the film could have been interesting, if it had anything to do with anything or if the characters did anything with it. In the background of a lot of scenes, we see news footage of George W. Bush or Barack Obama on TV, giving speeches about the economy of 2008. At first, I thought the director was simply saying, "Here's your clue that this takes place during the 2008 election." But after a few scenes, I realized the director wanted us to know that it meant something.

I'm sure the majority of film critics working today pleasured themselves greatly during these scenes of Yes We Can nostalgia, but really: how many of these thugs are going to listen to this stuff on their car radio or behind the bar of their local watering hole? They don't comment on it until the last scene of the movie, and in fact appear to be oblivious to it in every other scene. So why is it on their radios and television sets everywhere they end up? Rings false.

All of the actors in this movie do a fine job. Indeed, even Gandolfini's self-indulgent scenes are fine when you take them on their own, as you would for a scene study in some college course. But when you line them up one after the other for 90 minutes, it's a yawn (quite literally: the guy in front of me fell asleep halfway through the movie and didn't wake up until the credits).

Be careful if you're going into this looking for a Scorsese or Tarantino gangster picture. I would also caution you against seeing it if you think it's film noir. I've seen that written in a couple of places, that this movie is somehow a good example of film noir. It isn't.

Photos: Yahoo Movies.