Killing Them Softly

 

There are few things more pretentious than a failed art-film.  Director Andrew Dominik, coming not so fresh off of 2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, takes a shot at the crime-film genre and mostly misses, with this tale of a crime syndicate seeking revenge for the heist of an illegal gambling racket.  Killing Them Softly takes place over the few days leading up to the 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama, and unfolds mostly as conversations between gangsters, leading up to and away from the violent events they plan, conversations that most other crime films take for granted.  The purpose here is in drawing a parallel between the corporate-like dealings of a criminal enterprise and the threat of economic collapse facing the country at that time, and Dominik does not miss an opportunity to blast a speech by Bush or Obama or McCain anytime a character is inside an automobile or a bar, which is practically the entire ninety minute film.  Brad Pitt enters after a half-hour to the not-so-subtle strains of Johnny Cash’s “When The Man Comes Around,” as Jackie Cogan, the cleaner sent in to organize the hits that will bring things back to normal.  And when the acts of violence do come, they are so over-directed, with achingly slow, slow motion that serves only to exaggerate their graphic nature, and convey a desperate hope of drawing some sort of meaning.  

The title refers to the way Cogan prefers to kill people, from a distance, without getting too up close and personal.  Would that director Dominik had the same compassion for his audience.  There is a fine line between style and substance, and all too often in Killing Them Softly the former becomes the latter, desperate to compensate for the willful lack of drama.  It might sound great on paper to craft an entire film out of conversations between hit-men, and James Gandofini and Richard Jenkins, along with Pitt, have a grand old time trading barbs while the lives of men hang in the balance.  And it wouldn't even be a stretch to frame the entire thing as a metaphor for the economic crisis, also resolved by conversations between men behind closed doors, while lives, and financial empires, hung in the balance.  The problem is that Andrew Dominik wants to be a player in his own film, and refuses to allow the audience to connect its own dots.  The hits are so elaborately choreographed and photographed that even a simple drive-by at a traffic light has to become a symphony of exploding glass, ripping skin, and gushing blood, caught in actual droplets moving through the air by exhaustively slow motion that would make John Woo himself cringe.  This is a film with an agenda, and it's ultimately Dominik's heavy hand with respect to it that sinks his film.  Leaving the theatre you are either going to wonder what the point of all the political commentary was, or you are going to have eye strain from rolling them.  Either way, it's not a fun night out at the cinema.  If you can forget that everything is just a means to the director's end, there are moments when the sparks of chemistry fly between the actors, and they get into a rhythm.  Good luck with that.


** 1/2 out of *****