Killing Them Softly Review

[Westside Steve]

Killing Them Softly

Weinstein

R 97 min

Okay I'm a huge fan of those dark, mean, pretty stories about gangsters lowlifes killers and crooks. You guys know what I'm talking about. Movies including but not limited toMEAN STREETS, MILLERS CROSSING , RESERVOIR DOGS, and TAXI DRIVER just to mention a few. Well let me tell you , KILLING THEM SOFTLY ranks right up there with all those testosterone fueled epics.

Almost.

To be truthful there may be a little bit of a spoiler here so feel free to read the rest of the voice until you've seen it.

We start out with an apparently brilliant plan for a heist . It seems there is a mob sanctioned card game which promises to have 30 to 40,000 bucks just waiting to be stolen. Why is this such a sweet deal? Well, a few years back Markey (Ray Liotta) who is in charge of this particular game actually put together a successful scheme to rob it. That was never proven to the satisfaction of the mob but the suspicion lingered in the air and Markey is under constant scrutiny. That game had been shut down for a long time severely cramping the syndicates revenue. A small time crook, assumes that if the card game was rated a second time the blame would surely fall on Markey. That way, hopefully, the two mugs he hires should escape the retribution of the bad guys.

Of course you can guess that nothing is going to go as it was planned.

Actually it looks pretty good for a short time, the morons get the money get away and to finger is pointed toward Markey. Unfortunately Russell (Ben Mendelsohn), a junkie, shoots of his mouth to the wrong wiseguy.

Oh Markey is still in the crosshairs since his sudden demise will certainly take the clamps off the game and allow the illicit profits to flow once more. Unfortunately the three idiots who actually pulled off the crime have now had their names added to the list for extermination. In this case the exterminator, is a soft hearted hit man played by Brad Pitt. He's actually met one intended victim so he doesn't want to do all three hits. Enter Mickey (James Gandolfini), a depressed and alcoholic killer who has ditched his parole officer to take up Pitts slack. I won't give away the ending however I will say that I was stunned. Should you choose to see this you'll know what I mean.

Something that did puzzle me is this: oftentimes period films will use an array of pop songs from the time. Here the time period is around the 2008 election, they've chosen to use sound bites from the political campaign as backdrop. Now I realize that Brad Pitt is not only a very political kind of guy but also one of the films producers. I'm sure someone is trying to make some kind of ham handed statement here but for the life of me I couldn't really get a grasp on it or work uip an interest. All I know is that even though I was enjoying the ride of the film intensity it was indeed annoying to hear President Obama's voice honking away at his campaign platitudes every few minutes.

Brad, since we know you regularly read the voice, drop me an email and let me know what grand idea I may have missed. Quentin Tarantino meets Michael Moore?

If gritty and violent is your cup of tea you will probably enjoy a great deal of this as I did. On the other hand the politics and the ending pushed killing them softly from an A to a B.

 

B

 

WSS

Email: westsidesteve@aol.com