Director: Andrew Dominik
Cast: Brad Pitt, Richard Jenkins, James Gandolfini, Ray Liotta
Release Date: 21st September 2012
Movie lore insists heists planned by idiots must go wrong and so, basing another film on this idea seems uninspired. Killing Them Softly, however, comes from the team that made the terrific albeit cumbersomely titled The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. It also boasts a rogues gallery of reliably sterling actors snaked from Scorsese, the Coens and The Sopranos. But, in spite of all this, Killing Them Softly emerges as a film painfully unaware of its cringe-inducing pretension.
It’s Brad Pitt’s hollow swagger in the lead role that emerges as its most exasperating component. Sporting a greasy bouffant, scuzzy leather jacket and tinted aviators, he’s going for a charismatic sociopath in the vein of Jesse James, but comes across more as Bono playing cops and robbers. This is merely the film’s most discernible example of its unself-aware posturing. Behind Pitt’s hairdo lurks a cavalcade of over-the-hill actors hamming it up as childish characters blathering and meandering through a non-existent story that the filmmakers clearly thought could be darkly humorous, rich with pathos and politically relevant, all at the same time. They were wrong and their film is a ludicrous failure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDyaNnrgdp4
Words: Alex Towers
