Film Review | Killing Them Softly

How do you talk about a film that's both brilliant and deplorable?

Andrew Dominik's follow-up to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - another brooding meditation on the inextricable link between America and violence, also starring Brad Pitt - is a technically dazzling journey into the criminal underworld, packed with bravura cinematography, instantly memorable dialogue and first-class acting from all involved.

But for all the textured and mature gilding of its external layer, Killing Them Softly is also the most amateurish thing of all - a self-important allegory flagging up very specific social issues in the most facile way imaginable, so that any visceral enjoyment is deflated by its preachy style.

Aiming to comment on the state of the American economy - and the shift from Bush to Obama - by adapting George V. Higgins's cult crime novel Cogan's Trade, Dominik introduces us to a pair of small-time criminals - Frankie (Scoot McNary) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) - who follow through with a foolhardy plan to rob a gangster's (Ray Liotta) gambling ring.

While the pair manage to make off with the cash after the heist, a bounty is placed on their head, and veteran hitman Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) comes to town to collect.

But it is not just the two perps who have to negotiate their way across a treacherous landscape to remain afloat - the laconic Cogan is also compromised by an increasingly more professionalised and bureaucratic criminal system, which can shift its goal posts at every whim... in a way that eerily resembles the contemporary economic climate.

Though it retains the source novel's 1970s atmosphere with its early-Scorcese griminess and a fondness for vintage cars, Dominik's adaptation makes it clear to us from the word go that Killing Them Softly aims to be an allegory for the state of the American nation as it is today.

Which would have been fine, were he not so insistent on shoe-horning a Bush/Obama/McCain speech into every single scene that features either a car radio or a TV set.

Dominik's message is so heavy handed that it even manages to obscure - and arguably, tip over - what is otherwise a visually arresting, intelligent and often moving film. In many ways, it's as much of a stylish-violent tour de force as last year's diamond-in-the-rough thriller Drive.

But where Drive was lean, this is heavy with its own self-importance, and no amount of well-meaning allegory and masterfully executed scenes of drug use and violence can compensate for it.

Which is doubly sad, because had Dominik restrained his desire to sermonise, he would have had more than enough material with which to craft a memorable crime drama.

Take, for example, a refreshing role-reversal scene for gangster film veteran Ray Liotta. We're used to seeing him order beatings and executions - here, he gets a taste of his own medicine (from previous films) and gets beaten down in a scene so visceral that it'll leave you in near-tears of pity (and that's another plus: the violence on display is far from glamourised: every punch comes with an unpleasant wet thwack, and each bullet penetrates slowly and painfully).

Then there's the infuriatingly lovable James Gandolfini - he of The Sopranos fame, taking on the role of washed-up, alcohol-laden and sex addicted hitman Mickey; a character laced with fury, misplaced nostalgia and quietly broiling anger. Mickey's dialogue - though this counts for most of the characters in the film - could have been written by Tarantino... were Tarantino to have a more human touch. It's streetwise though strangely poetic, crammed with sometimes shocking, memorable turns. Dominik's handling of the visual palette is also impressive, and coupled with great performances across the board, it makes for a pungent cocktail - particularly during heady moments like Russell's drugged out reverie (Mendelsohn delivers a turn packed with hilarity and nerves).  The big downer, really, is not that the story is derailed by pseudo-political subtext, but that the subtext threatens to become (tedious) text.

And by the end, it actually does, thanks to a less-than-subtle speech telegraphing exactly what the film wanted to hint at all along.

Which would have been fine, were this not presented to us as some kind of climax.

My advice? Enjoy the same metaphor elsewhere: TV dramas The Wire and Breaking Bad are both excellent embodiments of the idea that there's no real philosophical difference been the mainstream economy and the criminal one.

You could also give Dominik and Pitt's previous collaboration a whirl. Perhaps it was the fog of period drama that managed to save The Assassination of Jesse James... from similarly pretentious pontificating, but the end result is a far more lyrical, far more dignified meeting of story and ideas.