The Poker Night

Killing Them Softly

*** out of ****

Directed by: Andrew Dominik

Starring: Brad Pitt, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, Richard Jenkins and James Gandolfini

Running time: 98 minutes

Weeks away from the 2008 presidential election, New Orleans is a ghost town, with garbage strewn all over the streets and not a trumpet’s note heard. Already sitting in ruin from the whipping winds of Hurricane Katrina three years prior, the Big Easy is going through big hardship, further crippled by the financial collapse on Wall St.

Pre-Obama New Orleans is the setting for Killing Them Softly, a rough, wiry and well-acted gangster story set amidst financial disarray. The film reunites writer/director Andrew Dominik with his Assassination of Jesse James star Brad Pitt, who once again plays a cunning if enigmatic outlaw.

Pitt is Jackie Cogan, a hitman assigned to eliminate two amateur thieves, the off-kilter Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and his junkie friend Russell, (Ben Mendelsohn). Frankie and Russell are two intermediaries who rob a card game where many of the city’s criminals allocate their stolen riches.

At the head of the table is Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), a sleaze that tried to pull a similar heist years earlier. After disclosing to the players that he had set up an inside job, his criminal friends were amused. Regardless, they figure that if something like that happens again, they can put the heat onto Markie; unfortunately, Trattman’s mistake spawns the imitators.

Frankie and Russell swoop in with poor masks and dishwashing gloves and take the cash. Cogan knows that the only way to revitalize the region’s broken crime syndicates is to have Markie killed – but that doesn’t mean the two petty thieves can get away with their riches.

Killing Them Softly gets its title from Cogan’s method for murder – to shoot from a distance and make a clean getaway. Pitt’s work as a forceful hitman is nuanced, closely linked to the mysterious killer tropes from recent films like Drive and The American.

Dominik sometimes overreaches with some flashy tricks, such as one scene that uses camera filters to align the audience with a drugged-up Russell. However, some of these woozier shots come from Russell’s point of view while others are from Frankie’s position – although his friend is sober. Further, one of the kills on Cogan’s spree is delivered in colourful and very inauthentic CGI, contrary to the character's method that the title alludes to.

Dominik has a better ear for dialogue. While the plot is lean, the characters ramble on – and to good effect. Frankie and Russell speak like giddy high-schoolers about to shoplift before heading to the card game in a drawn-out scene that situates them as the amateur thugs they are.

On the other side of town, disgruntled hitman Mickey (James Gandolfini) muses to Cogan about his financial troubles and sexual disappointments. These scenes are superfluous to the plot but situate the setting within a desperate underbelly of criminals that is so strapped for cash that the mob cannot even tip a waiter for drinks.

Killing Them Softly is compact and its ensemble of character actors exceptional; Mendelsohn and McNairy are devilishly funny as the incompetent poser criminals while few actors relish bitter profane streaks better than Gandolfini.

However, audiences should be warned: the film is rough, bleak and full of bone-cracking violence. It has the ear and (occassionally) the eye of an unsentimental street-set 70s film (in fact, the end credits ditch jazzy music halfway through for B-roll sound of cars and police sirens). Like the debt-ridden crooks in the film, it leaves no tip to thank you for your service.