Raja Sen thinks Killing Them Softly shows off sparks of potential but doesn't work.Mob movie traditions bounce all over the place in Andrew Dominik's neat, nihilistic Killing Them Softly, a film that engages only in parts and, while well performed, is considerably weighed down by its own inertness.
Much is borrowed from the crime classics -- character traits, exposition technique, chatty hitmen, and even a winding tracking shot, albeit in reverse -- but Dominik bravely attempts to subvert the genre by winding it down, by showing us the banality behind the bullets, the business behind the bravado.
The problem with recreating dullness accurately, however, is that stupefied hands are too busy stifling yawns to applaud.
A pair of lowlifes -- in dishwashing gloves and seemingly ineffective masks -- rob a poker game at gunpoint, and it is through this point that cinematic tension builds up like a fireswallower taking a deep breath. Things constantly skate on the edge of disaster, and you can't help waiting for some potentially bloody catastrophe.
After this longish, masterfully tight scene, however, it's all boring bluster as Dominik starts drawing tenuous parallels about recession-struck corporations, the mob and America itself, the latter emphasised by television sets in bars constantly tuned to Obama-speeches.
Brad isn't buying Barack's schtick. Playing a queasy assassin named Jackie Cogan, Pitt earnestly delivers lines about how he likes to kill from a distance, "softly" and never those he's already met.
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