The Case for Soft Death

A few years ago now, there was this guy called Quentin Tarantino who burst onto the movie scene with his highly violent films full of sparkling dialogue and catchy music and different assortments of well known (though sometimes waning) stars.  Killing Them Softly feels like one of his films, except lesser.

A lot of the elements are there.  The soundtrack for one seems to have been carefully chosen, although it doesn't quite frame or propel the action quite the way a Tarantino film would.  There is a huge amount of dialogue shared between some very well known thespians, though none of it sparkles with random references to hamburgers or block buster films.  And there is quite a bit of violence, using the slow motion camera tricks so popular in most action movies these days.

The film follows the lives of a few small time crooks participating in a gangster heist.  One of these is the always awesome Ben Mendelsohn, the brilliant Australian actor whose form seems to be twisting over time into one perfect for playing drug addicted sociopaths, while his more stable colleague in crime is played by the likable Scoot McNairy.  After they commit their crime, they are hunted by professional gangster "cleaners" played by Brad Pitt and James Gandolfini, while constantly in the background, the TVs and radio blare with the news of President Bush and his revelation of and reaction to America's economic crisis - the parallels between the bankruptcy of the country and the moral bankruptcy of the mob painfully laid out.

Perhaps "painful" is too harsh a word.  Mendelsohn and McNairy, as Russell and Frankie, are easy going larrakins and their bumbling adventures are quite watchable.  The hardest part of the story to follow is a scene where the effects of drugs are presented visually - possibly accurately, but using that "slow motion" technique I mentioned earlier to a really distracting effect.

But, once their heist is done, the film belongs to Pitt as Jackie Coogan, with the odd visit to see what Gandalfini's Mickey is up to.  And the film kind of does play that way - Mickey's role seems completely irrelevant to the main story, though it does give Gandalfini the chance to play a shattered man with quite a few issues to sort through.  That leaves Jackie to do a lot of the slow motion shooting and to give the big "life lesson" speeches and... that kind of stuff.

In the end, a lot of the elements of a good film are there, but to me, the whole thing never really came together.  Killing Them Softly is Tarantino-lite, trying to convey a big message, but failing, again in slow motion, to make it all come together into something satisfying.  There are a huge number of amazing performances in there too, but there are some moments where the ability to fast forward or go and get a cuppa would have been appreciated.

Verdict: Killing Them Softly is a return to a style of films past, but it kind of gets lost along the way and ends up somewhere mediocre.  Its not for a lack of trying or for lack of a good cast, but just a lack of... style?  Whatever it lacks, I found the film interesting but unsatisfying, a collection of great scenes not always bound well together.  6 sawn off shotguns out of 10.