Killing Them Softly

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Year:	2012
Country of origin:	USA
Director:	Andrew Dominik
Genre:	Low key gangster flick
Starring:	Brad Pitt,      Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohnm, James Gandolfini, Vincent Curatola
Rating:	4/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1764234/
Tagline:	No tagline
Favourite line:	"They cry, they plead, they beg, they piss themselves, they cry for their mothers. It gets embarrassing. I like to kill 'em softly."

Low-key gangster shenanigans

The plot:
Two grease ball slackers, Frankie and Russell, desperate for money, decide on a rather reckless course of action. One of them, Frankie, knows of a high-rollers poker game that has already been hit and thinks that, if they now take their turn to hit it, the original culprit will once more be blamed. Heading into the poker room wearing stockings on their heads and marigold gloves on their hands, their venture smacks of amateurishness, but still they escape with the loot.
Presently, Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) arrives on the scene, and he is anything but amateurish. Tasked with bringing the men responsible for the theft to justice, Cogan plays by his own rules, and kills without emotion, willing to do whatever it takes, just so long as he gets his money…..

Playing like an extended episode of the simply remarkable Soprano’s, it’s no surprise when James ‘Tony Soprano’ Gandolfini turns up for an extended cameo, nor that the brains behind the theft is none other than Vincent ‘Johnny Sacks’ Curatola.
Soprano’s connections aside, this is high-brow gangster fodder, the movie played out over a backdrop of political sound bites from TV screens wherever the characters go – in the bars; whilst the poker is being played – with Obama and McCain duking it out for presidential election, whilst offering grim warnings of tough financial times ahead Indeed, this is, at its heart, a tale of how, in difficult times for all, even mobsters feel the heat on their wallets but that, unlike most of us, they don’t just sit back and take it, but up the ante in terms of violence, and demonstrates just what they are willing to do to earn a buck.
Brad Pitt, as always, is just excellent. Truly he is the last remaining Hollywood great, a man for whom no resentment can be felt at his good fortune – the wealth, the women, the fame – for his is a remarkable talent, and he deserves every blessing that comes his way as a result.
With a solid ensemble, a crackling good plot that really leaves you guessing just which way it will turn – you know it will all end badly, but the precise nature is hard to pin down until very, very late on – this fizzes with an energy that evades most mainstream Hollywood fodder.
Oh, and Ray ‘Goodfellas’ Liotta is in it, too, and gets the shit well and truly beaten out of him in, presumably, the scene that earned the film an 18 rating.
Top notch gangsterism, this.