Message is clear in this ‘Killing’
Killing
acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Obama says that the “American Promise” tells us that we have “the freedom to make of our own lives what we will, but that we also have obligations to treat each other with dignity and respect.” This voiceover occurs as we see a gray landscape littered with swirling trash. Despite any lofty rhetoric, it is clear that there is no hope in this cinematic world.
Bootstrapping in “Killing Them Softly” amounts to choosing whom to rob, and consideration for others is the furthest thing from anyone’s minds.
Low-level crime boss Johnny Amato (Vincent Curatola) has an idea for a quick score. He just needs two guys dumb enough or brave enough to execute the plan. A few years earlier, Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta) had robbed his own card game and then had the temerity to brag about it.
Amato figures the game can be knocked over again, and all of the blame and subsequent harm will land on Trattman. He employs Frankie (Scoot McNairy), a pasty and disheveled street thug who speaks with a nasally Boston accent, like Ratso Rizzo if he had fallen in with Will Hunting’s Southie crew. Despite his concerns about his mate Russell’s (Ben Mendelson) fitness, he brings along the Australian junkie for the score.
Dominik’s camera follows closely behind this two-man gang that can’t shoot straight as they fumble through a nerverattling heist. In the background of the robbery is audio of president George W. Bush talking about the anxieties brought on by the unstable financial climate.
The scene offers another taste of the overwrought attempt to tie the micro-story of this underworld economic calamity to the greater financial disaster undermining American society.
Though the two fools get away from their illconceived incident without harm, the danger has just begun. The mobsters robbed in the game want answers. But they don’t want to get their hands dirty. Enter Pitt’s Jackie, a dispassionate and utterly professional