Hoodlums and hit-men collide face-first with the recession in Killing Them Softly, a dark, disenchanted and decidedly indelicate new film from actor-producer Brad Pitt and director Andrew Dominick. Adapted from George V. Higgins' 1974 novel Cogan’s Trade, the film stars Pitt as a professional hit-man tasked with tracking down the men who robbed a mob-protected card-game. But as with Pitt and Dominick’s previous collaboration – the contemplative Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – Killing Them Softly has aspirations of intellect beyond its genre conventions, and its violent plotting is accompanied at every turn by trendily pessimistic commentary on capitalist greed and iniquity – commentary that’s delivered, unfortunately, with all the finesse of a shotgun blast leveled straight at the back of your head.
The stricken streets of New Orleans circa late 2008 prove an obvious backdrop for Dominick’s grim financial metaphor, one in which the criminal underworld scrambles against economic collapse after a pair of junkies named Frankie (Scoot McNairy; Monsters) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn; Animal Kingdom) pull a heist on an underground poker match. Their plan is to pin the blame of the games’ organiser Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta; Observe and Report), already on thin ice with the community after pinching from the coffers himself the year before. But while the robbery is successful, the frame up doesn’t stick – and with the city’s illicit gambling suddenly at a standstill, the bosses are forced to dispatch ruthless Jackie Cogan (Pitt) to restore consumer confidence via bloody retribution.
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