James Gandolfini doesn’t have a lot to do in the slow “Killing Them Softly.” (
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‘Killing Them Softly” is already a historical curiosity: It’ll go down as the first and last gangster picture about the Romney presidency.
I’m being slightly unfair, and Andrew Dominik’s hit-man film does offer plenty of allegorical fodder for both left and right. But it isn’t much of a movie. I might forgive the slow start if it weren’t for the slow middle and slow end.
Dominik, who previously mesmerized me with the superb “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” uses a George Higgins novel to launch a familiar saga about a pair of low-IQ lowlifes (Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn) who think they’re smart enough to rob some very heavy dudes who play in a poker game hosted by the slightly less moronic Markie (Ray Liotta). Brad Pitt, giving an uninteresting cool-guy performance he’s done many times before, is the cruelly efficient hit man who gets called in to administer punishment for all this to the satisfaction of the mob.
And that’s pretty much the whole story, modestly jazzed up with occasional wry dialogue that’s about two-thirds as good as Elmore Leonard’s
(which is about two-thirds as good as Quentin Tarantino’s).
This stuff is not exactly original, but Dominik thinks he’s got a really funky coat of paint to put on it: He sees everything as a metaphor for the autumn 2008 financial crisis and the election of Barack Obama.
In case you miss the intent, there is an excerpt from an Obama speech in the opening seconds. There’s a shot of dueling Obama and John McCain billboards. As the movie goes on, in the background there’s always a video or audio clip of Obama or George W. Bush. And at the end there’s a big Pitt speech (while he watches Obama on election night) tying politics to crime. This is Dominik’s third movie, but putting your themes in all capital letters, and putting the capital letters in neon, is a rookie mistake.
Worse than the plodding pace (every scene goes on too long, characters such as James Gandolfini’s assistant assassin drift in and out without making a mark) and the blaring obviousness (the Velvet Underground song “Heroin” backs up a scene about . . . heroin?) is this: I’m not even sure Dominik knows exactly what he’s saying. That’s right: He’s vague and loud at the same time, like the barstool sage on his 15th vodka.
The wised-up killers in the movie say they’re far too clever to be suckered by Obama’s golden words about community. Change, we’re told, is a myth: There’s only the logic of power and money. (Dominik ends the film, in a hack move, with the song, “Money (That’s What I Want).”) You’re a fool for believing otherwise, and for Obama to be replaced, the very month of this film’s release, by a venture capitalist would have been the ideal coda for the film.
That didn’t, like “Killing Them Softly,” quite work out.
This kind of acutely undergraduate thinking works fine to give some heft, or at least faux heft, to a pop song. (“A man with a briefcase can steal more money than any man with a gun” — Don Henley. “Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king” — Bob Dylan. Etc., etc., etc.). We ask a film for more complexity.
Hit man Jackie (Pitt) argues that the host of the poker game, who previously stole from his own guests, must die for the sake of appearances, even though he is not responsible for the second robbery, because poker activity has seized up out of fright. Dominik plays this against liquidity in the financial system drying up in 2008 because banks are afraid to loan to one another.
Clever, only not: On Wall Street, who gets whacked? The problem with 2008 is, it wasn’t just one person who needed to have his brains splattered in the elegant super slo-mo of Dominik’s most visually captivating scene. It was the entire crazy mortgage system that was broken, from lenders to people who bought more house than they could afford to regulators who encouraged them. The financial crisis wasn’t “Goodfellas.” It was “Murder on the Orient Express.”