Killing Them Softly

Killing Them Softly might just be one of my favourite films. It came out ten years ago and it is one of those films I rewatch and rewatch.

This film came out and bombed big style in 2012. I remember a friend wrote on Facebook (when it was acceptable to post there), Boring them slowly.

I must have been watching a different film because I found Killing Them Softly riveting.

Unromantic grim reality

It felt like the reality of gangsters. It feels stripped of the romanticism of Scorcese’s gangster epics like Goodfellas and Casino. Killing them Softly feels more like a warts and all portrait of the criminal underworld. These are not men of honour but frightened dogs willing to turn on each other at the first sign of trouble.

There is no “cool” like there is with Tarantino’s films or Winding Refn’s Drive. This is a dark, pathetic underbelly.

Brad Pitt may get top billing, but this is Scoot McNairy’s film. He plays a low-life thug who, under orders from a friend, holds up a mobster’s poker game run by Ray Liotta’s Markie. The mob call in Brad Pitt’s Jackie Coogan to bring order to the chaos.

What I love is that there’s no real cat-and-mouse element. It feels more like a procedural. The game has been knocked over so we need to take out Markie, first we have to beat him up then we have to make an example of him.

The characters feel like they characters are trapped in a system bigger than them and all they can do is play their part. Everyone involved know there’s no point to what they are doing yet they do it anyway.

The film is a series of conversations with brief flashes of violence.

Even though I consider this a masterpiece, that does not mean I consider it flawless. If anything, the flaws accentuate Killing Them Softly’s greatness.

Killing Them Softly – the flaws

• The 2008 financial crisis parallels didn’t do anything for me. You never saw how bad the underworld was affected by the crash. Was it Markie going from a big hall to a backroom in a motel was that supposed to be an example? It felt like the financial crash was not made as clear as it could have been
• Everything goes according to plan. The poker heist goes according to plan, and the hits go according to plan. There’s never a screw-up or a witness. Everything goes without a hitch.
• One of the hits is almost too stylish for the film. Everything else is attempting to make criminals look vainglorious but one of the hits with it’s use of gorgeous slow motion and Ketty Lester track is just to beautiful for this film.
• Having it set in New Orleans doesn’t really add much either, in fact I wasn’t even clear on that first time round, only from repeated viewings

Those are my only gripes with the film, and they are minor.

Everything else works wonderful.

• Brad Pitt and Richard Jenkins consultations are a highlight as they talk about how corporate and indecisive the mob has become over the years.

• People complain about the James Gandolfini character being boring, but it misses the point. He is supposed to be a boring character. He is supposed to be an insufferable bore, a well-past-his-prime hitman obsessed with prostitutes.

• Ben Mendelson is great as the grubby heroin addict; he looks like he’s sticky. You feel grubby every scene he’s in.

• The dialogue is crazy good. The majority is lifted word for word from the source novel Coogan’s Trade (Also recommended). There is a brutal honest attitude to how men speak to each other it becomes relatable.

• The final scene diverges from the novel, with Dominick using it to tie in the thematic elements of the film and it is fantastic. This film has one of the best last lines in film history: “Now fucking pay me”. That line is up there with “Nobody’s perfect.”

Killing them Softly is not for everyone but for those who it is, this film is a masterpiece. If you meet it on it’s terms, you might love it as much as I do.