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

REVIEW: The Cabin in the Woods

The Cabin in the Woods (2012): Dir. Drew Goddard. Written by Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon. Starring: Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz, Jesse Williams, Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford. Rated R (Blood and breasts). Running time: 95 minutes.

2 ½ stars (out of four)

Two jocks, a floozy, a stoner and a naive sweetheart walk into a cabin in the woods. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

But maybe you haven’t. The Cabin in the Woods is a horror film that, as its title suggests, takes on one of the genre’s most elemental formulas. Horny teenagers and deranged slashers have been sharing campgrounds for decades now but co-writers Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard (who also directed the film) are interested in delivering more than your standard bloody, wooded excursion. They seek to turn a familiar premise – and, with it, just about every other horror movie convention – on its head and offer up a complete genre deconstruction.

A horror movie’s success often hinges on its ability to surprise. Audiences demand a sudden scare, an unexpected twist or, sometimes, considering how formulaic these movies tend to be, the surprise may be as slight as the order in which the characters are killed.

The Cabin in the Woods certainly has its share of surprises. The movie toys with our expectations and subverts them, letting us think we know where it is going, only to yank the rug out from under its own clichés. This makes for plenty of unexpected moments but also means the movie too often feels like an exercise in meta cleverness.

Among the doomed kids is David (Chris Hemsworth), a cocky football player who gets the cabin on loan from his cousin. Joining him for the weekend are his girlfriend Jules (Anna Hutchison), her best friend Dana (Kristen Connolly), his teammate Holden (Jesse Williams) and their pothead pal Marty (Fran Kranz). Each fits a familiar slasher movie archetype, though the movie hints there may be more to their two-dimensional personalities than we first expect.

Before we even meet any of the vacationing teens, we are introduced to two curiously cavalier lab technicians, Richard (the always wonderful Richard Jenkins) and Steve (Bradley Whitford). They are employees in an sleek, underground facility that has remote access via video surveillance and more to the cabin. Of their role in what happens next, I will say no more except that they are the catalysts of a series of twists that continue to escalate through the film’s finale.

Perhaps because the scenes with the two lab techs break fresh, new territory, they are by far more interesting than what is going on in the cabin. (The witty repartee between Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Whitford helps too.) The cabin scenes are not without their moments but it’s hard to get too attached to, or root for, characters that are only stand-ins for self-referential commentary. Part of what makes trashy horror movies fun is the way they encourage us to cheer on some characters and wish death for others. The Cabin in the Woods is too self-aware for that. As soon as audience sympathies begin to form for a character, attention is called to that very sympathy, which is of course one of the ways Mr. Whedon and Mr. Goddard play with the formula, but it also takes the wind out of a few scenes. The movie wants to keep us at a distance.

In its final third, The Cabin in the Woods becomes an all-out funhouse of a movie and there is an inspired sequence that is the ultimate horror movie mash-up. It is a scene horror fans never knew they wanted but, now that it exists, is a must-see if only for its sheer audacity.

By the end, The Cabin in the Woods gives us plenty to smile at but no real scares or jolts. That was never its intention though. The movie is a smart critique of horror films without actually being an entry in the genre, a choice of approach that is as novel as it is limiting.

- Steve Avigliano, 4/24/12