Killing Them Softly Reviews
We Got This Covered
Killing Them Softly is well made, written, and acted, but the allegorical story and repulsive characters are too one-note and unpleasant to enjoy or recommend.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/10
NECN
Everything about the loaded-with-lowlives crime flick is elongated, extended to the very precipice of its expiration date.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Slant Magazine
The film's cynicism, like everything else, is nothing more than empty posturing, a fashionable pose adopted to ingratiate itself with a disenfranchised public.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Moviedex
The message is so unrelenting that it soon drowns out all the films' strengths in an ocean of fashionable nihilism and socially conscious outrage.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The Standard
There are many cinematic cardinal sins, but the latest film from Aussie director Andrew Dominik commits two of the big ones - Don't Be Boring and Don't Waste A Great Cast.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Las Vegas Weekly
Delivers some striking elements that never add up to a cohesive whole.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Ultra Culture
Built on dynamic set pieces and jet black humour, it's reminiscent of last year's Drive. It's a shame then, that Dominik saddles the film with a heavy-handed political subtext that would echo much louder if it spoke a little quieter.
Top CriticIt seems as if I've been seeing versions of this story since forever.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
While the cast is consistently watchable and on-point, Dominik disappoints as both scenarist and filmmaker.
The film, for all its visual felicities, comes to life only sporadically.
East Bay Express
Good actors and unimpeachable source material hampered by faulty chatter, leading to thumb-twiddling.
'Killing Them Softly' collapses under the crushing weight of the director's narcissism.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
It's a movie that shows, and then tells, tells, and tells again, its vibrant conjuring of contemporary cynicism felled by Dominik's lack of faith in his audience's ability to connect thematic dots.
Big Hollywood
Brad Pitt's hit man yarn keeps getting interrupted by political talking points as well as director Andrew Dominik's obsession with Tarantino-style tics.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
TV Guide's Movie Guide
While Dominik flourishes when it comes to the picture's excessive violence, he seems to be unable to balance those sequences with the drawn-out scenes of dialogue, which, while delivered nicely, kill any momentum the film might have had.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Film Geek Central
Movies like this frustrate me. There are many moments of genius to be found here, but the movie is just too uneven for me to recommend as a whole.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
PopMatters
This is a movie that literally explains everything, which walks us through every minor detail of life on the wrong side of the law... and none of it is very entertaining or interesting.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Blu-ray.com
Killing Them Softly is mad as hell and isn't going to take it anymore, but fails to provide an invitation to join the outrage.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
It isn't much of a movie. I might forgive the slow start if it weren't for the slow middle and slow end.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
An incredibly stylish genre exercise set in the world of mobsters, junkies and lowlifes, but it's also trying incredibly hard to be About Something.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
