Killing Them Softly **** (Brad Pitt, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, Richard Jenkins, James Gandolfini, Ray Liotta, Sam Shepard, Vincent Curatola) – Classic Movie Review 13,933

The brutal and bleak 2012 American neo-noir crime film Killing Them Softly stars Brad Pitt, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, Richard Jenkins, James Gandolfini, and Ray Liotta.

Writer/ director Andrew Dominik’s 2012 American neo-noir crime film Killing Them Softly is based on George V Higgins’s 1974 novel Cogan’s Trade, and stars Brad Pitt, along with Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, Richard Jenkins, James Gandolfini, Ray Liotta, Vincent Curatola, and (briefly) Sam Shepard. It is shocking, brutal and bleak.

Brad Pitt stars as hitman enforcer Jackie Cogan, hired to restore order after two dumbass, uselessly inexperienced low-life guys (Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn) carry out an armed robbery on a Mob-protected card game, and escape with $100,000, with a butterfly effect rupturing the Boston area criminal economy.

At the time of the 2008 financial crisis and US Presidential election, Squirrel Amato (Vincent Curatola) plans a robbery on a Mafia-controlled private poker game in Boston. He enlists former associate Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and, reluctantly accepts Frankie’s buddy heroin-addicted Australian immigrant Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) too. The dim duo target a game run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), who previously arranged an inside job by paying two men to steal the cash from his own illegal poker game and then foolishly and fatally later bragged about it. Squirrel is clever but not that clever. He misjudges that the crime syndicate Markie is involved with will think Markie staged a second inside robbery and have him killed, and Frankie and Russell will walk free. 

Killing Them Softly is a slick, stylish and cynical, extremely dark and forceful neo noir crime thriller. Based on George V Higgins’s 1974 novel Cogan’s Trade, it is very Seventies retro, conjuring up the mood and atmosphere and style and the movies of that time, and with even stronger violence than in that era. so it is not for the faint hearted. Realistic though the nasty violence is, everything about the film screams movie artifice. Sometimes it’s a style object. Sometimes it’s just stylish. Nobody is real life speaks dialogue like this, unfortunately, or real life would be more interesting, Luckily we have the movies to go to. Andrew Dominik’s dialogue is very amusing and clever

The stylised acting is powerful, showy, eye-catching, even flamboyant, with everybody making their mark. A suitably wrecked and tormented looking Brad Pitt is excellent, convincingly shabby and nasty, working excitingly in tandem with Scoot McNairy, Richard Jenkins and James Gandolfini. Pitt shows what a super actor he is when he is perfectly cast like this. In theory, McNairy, Jenkins and Gandolfini might arguably be better actors than he, but he lifts his game when playing with them. Though the film’s star, he is a generous actors with his colleagues. He doesn’t arrive till 24 minutes into a shortish movie (97 minutes) and then he doesn’t seek to dominate it, just slide into it, part of the scene and scenery.

Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn have the entire start of the film to themselves. They easily justify their casting. They take it to near comedy level, especially Mendelsohn, but hang onto it and don’t cross the line into parody. It’s not ‘real’ but it feels like it could be in some alternate universe. A Seventies crime thriller, maybe. The robbery is staged for maximum tension. It’s not a spectacular affair like, say, a bank heist. But, boy, it’s tense and intense. It always looks like there’s going to be a river of blood, the usual botches heist, but, wow, it is successful, and the boys just walk away with the loot!

Richard Jenkins keeps it low key and oh-so-sinister and creepy as mob lawyer The Driver. His conversations wit Pitt in his car are priceless. Pitt seems murderous, yet we guess that The Driver could have him murdered. James Gandolfini is really rather wonderful, sad, sweaty and hugely over-weight, a tragic figure, a wrecked-out looking man playing a wrecked-out man. Pitt plays his supportive straight man and prompt in their conversations. Ray Liotta’s character is equally tragic, heading to a dreadful conclusion because of some mistake or miscalculation he has previously made that is going to come back and smash him in the face like a malicious, vengeful boomerang. Gosh, this film is dark. Ray Liotta looks wrecked and haunted too. It’s only a movie, but he’s good at it.

The much less well known Vincent Curatola is ideal, looking and sounding right, as the half-canny heist deviser Squirrel Amato, a man behind a shabby desk, just hiring cannon fodder to get simpletons to do his dangerous dirty work. If it all goes wrong, he’ll still be safely behind his desk, won’t he? Or will he? (Curatola plays New York mafioso Johnny Sack in Gandolfini’s HBO show The Sopranos, so he knows what he’s doing.)

News of the financial crisis and US Presidential election is on the radio and TV everywhere. It’s a device, but it works. It makes a statement too, linking the world of organised crime with linking the worlds of business and politics. This is risky, but actually it works. Apparently they run the same way, Break a trust, everything collapses, the whole deck of cards. Dominik, who updates the novel’s story from 1974 to 2008, recalled: ‘As I started adapting it, it was the story of an economic crisis in an economy funded by gambling, a crisis due to a failure in regulation.’

The film ends suddenly, abruptly, with the story totally unresolved. It’s quite a clever ending, but it begs the question of where is the rest of the film. Apparently there was more of it, much more. Garret Dillahunt, whose role was cut out, said that the film’s first cut was two-and-a-half hours. On this occasion, rarely, more would be better. Presumably, Sam Shepard’s role must have been mor or less cut out, too.

Mixing pop tunes with Tarantino-style violence is iffy (as if the violence isn’t iffy enough). The song ‘Windmills of Your Mind’ is sung on the soundtrack by Petula Clark at a crucial moment. A bit sad, that.

Characters make several references to Boston area suburbs where the novel takes place, but it was filmed in the New Orleans area, starting in March 2011.

The film premiered in competition for the Palme d’Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival on May 22, 2012, and was released in the US on November 30, 2012 by the Weinstein Company, grossing $37.9 million against a $15 million budget.

They were looking for awards, and even delayed its US release by over two months to improve its chances for award nominations. But it didn’t win at Cannes and hardly anything anywhere else either. It is good, though, that it won Best Script at the Stockholm Film Festival and that Scoot McNairy won the 2012 Breakthrough Performer award at the Hamptons International Film Festival. Did I mention how great the script and McNairy are?

The Weinstein Company was founded in New York City by Bob and Harvey Weinstein on March 10, 2005.

Australian film director and screenwriter Andrew Dominik (born 7 October 1967) directed the crime film Chopper (2000), the Western drama film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), the neo-noir crime film Killing Them Softly (2012), and the biographical psychological drama Blonde (2022).

Dominik sent a text message to ask Pitt, who had previously starred in Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, if he would appear in the film. Pitt replied yes and it was all agreed in half an hour.

© Derek Winnert 2026 – Classic Movie Review 13,933

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