Killing Them Softly

Writer-director Andrew Dominik's bullets-and-bloodshed gangster film is set in post-Katrina New Orleans, circa 2008, where scheming Johnny Amato (Vincent Curatola) hires inexperienced and incompetent Frankie (Scoot McNairy), who recruits strung-out junkie Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) to rob a lucrative, high-stakes poker game run by mob hustler Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), a man who once pulled a similar heist on his own game. “You know they're gonna kill you?” Markie mumbles to Russell, which would seem to be the inevitable consequence of making off with mafia money. Right on cue, Brad Pitt struts onto the scene as cool enforcer Jackie Cogan, who likes to “kill them softly”—from a distance, without fuss or muss—and promptly engages in a talkathon with Driver (Richard Jenkins), a bespectacled mob liaison with an aversion to cigarette smoke. Based on George V. Higgins' pulpy 1974 crime novel, Cogan's Trade, this is a brooding, grimly brutal tale about seedy, low-life thugs feeling the pinch in an economic downturn, a film that sometimes awkwardly mixes gratuitous violence and lots of yammering. Also featuring James Gandolfini as a boozing/womanizing hitman, and Sam Shepard in a cameo, this violent and cynical film (“America's not a country; it's a business…”) is a strong optional purchase. [Note: DVD/Blu-ray extras include deleted scenes (10 min.), and a “making-of” featurette (5 min.). Exclusive to the Blu-ray release are bonus DVD, digital and UltraViolet copies of the film. Bottom line: a small extras package for an uneven film.] (S. Granger)