REVIEW: Killing Them Softly

Killing Them Softly (2012): Written and directed by Andrew Dominik. Based on the novel Cogan's Trade by George V. Higgens. Starring: Brad Pitt, Richard Jenkins, James Gandolfini, Ray Liotta, Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn. Rated R (Killings and robberies, and countless profane discussions about same). Running time: 97 minutes.

1 ½ stars (out of four)

I’m always in the mood to go to a diner and drink a cup of burnt coffee. It never runs me much more than a dollar, the waitress serves it on a saucer and, if you go to my diner, it comes with a small mountain of half-and-half packets served on a saucer of their very own. I can’t explain why but I just enjoy it.

I’m also always down to see a movie about small-time crooks, hit men and seedy jobs carried out for quick cash. These movies can also be about the cops who chase those crooks down and arrest them but they’re usually better if they’re not.

Killing Them Softly is one such movie about crooks. These particular crooks like to talk and they talk so much that there isn’t any room for the cops aside from a siren here and a “Hands behind your back” there. That’s fine by me; I happen to especially enjoy movies where the crooks talk more than they shoot.

Killing Them Softly was written and directed by Andrew Dominik, who also made the methodical and brooding western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. He’s a man who likes his genres and he lavishes this particular genre film with a style that is alternately flashy and gritty.

In one moment he lingers on a shot of Brad Pitt, who plays a calm and collected hit man with slicked back hair and Aviator shades, exhaling a slow gust of cigarette smoke. The next moment, Mr. Dominik gets good and close to a pool of blood spilling out from a newly dead body and onto the blacktop of a parking lot. And at least once he slows down a kill shot so we can appreciate some splattering brain matter for all its disgusting beauty.

The last time I saw a genre movie this in love with itself was Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive. That movie was a little too obsessed with its aesthetic pleasures – the 80’s synths, the sports cars, Ryan Gosling’s jawline – but was gorgeous enough that I didn’t object to the total irrelevance of its plot. Killing Them Softly isn’t nearly pretty enough to pull that trick off.

And Andrew Dominik isn’t nearly the master stylist he thinks he is. Come on, Andrew, you’re going to play “Heroin” while a junkie shoots up heroin? That’s amateur no matter which way you cut it.

Killing Them Softly is an insistently showy movie and its artsy experimentations get distracting. Notice that the film is set in the fall of 2008 amid the financial crisis. Clips of George W. Bush and Barack Obama are shown or heard in the background of practically every other scene, bluntly and needlessly reinforcing the desperate times its characters live in. Listen to the sound design (and believe me, the movie really wants you to listen to its sound design) and notice how laughter in the background of a bar scene is foregrounded at key moments in the dialogue. Well, I assume they were key moments. I kind of stopped paying attention.

The dialogue, by the way, is just as showy, relying too much on repetition and rhythm, and featuring little in the way of verbal ingenuity. It’s okay to let the characters gab on about whatever is on their mind but their conversations should crackle with life. The dialogue here circles around and around with dizzying tediousness.

And if talk is going to be a greater focus than action, the movie has to be willing to punch things up once in a while with a little energy and excitement. Killing Them Softly is only 97 minutes long but drags on at a glacial pace. I now have firsthand proof of Einstein’s theory of relativity.

There are a few spare moments in the film when things click and Mr. Dominik gets it right. Scenes between a pair of amateur criminals, Frankie (a wonderfully twitchy Scoot McNairy) and Russell (an equally fun Ben Mendelsohn, spaced out and looking truly awful as the aforementioned junkie), have a grungy giddiness to them and enliven the otherwise stale proceedings. Ray Liotta and James Gandolfini, meanwhile, are criminally underused and the movie completely wastes an appearance from the great Richard Jenkins, the current sitting King of Character Actors.

Brad Pitt lends the film as much of his charm and magnetism as he can muster but Killing Them Softly isn’t very interested in satisfying its audience with the thrills they expect from a movie like this. It’s too self-absorbed to cede any control to its star, preferring instead suck the wind out of a perfectly good tale of crime gone wrong by acting like an art film that is too good for its own material.

I can appreciate a crummy cup of joe as much as anyone but don’t serve me burnt coffee and call it a cappuccino.

- Steve Avigliano, 12/6/12