Killing Them Softly Reviews
Top Critic'Killing Them Softly' collapses under the crushing weight of the director's narcissism.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Like its source material, the movie is stylish, profane, intelligent, and eminently diverting. But as much as it is a delight that Dominik has disinterred Higgins's work, it is a mild disappointment that the result is not more substantial.
Trading in pleasures of a deliberately rarefied sort, writer-director Andrew Dominik's talky, character-rich genre piece largely short-circuits thrills to sketch a grimly funny portrait of thugs taking care of business, in every rotten sense of the word.
Ultimately, as crafted as Killing Them Softly is, it's less satisfying than either The Sopranos or Goodfellas. Still, Dominik and his cast cruise some very mean streets indeed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The dialogue is sharp and so are the performances. Andrew Dominik directed this neo-noir in a low-key comic style that's alternately gritty and fancy. The gritty stuff is best.
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| Original Score: B+
Dominik ... expertly captures the flavor of his Higgins source material.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A stylish, brutal affair that delivers grim atmosphere and punishing violence but loses impact in telegraphing its political punches.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
If those cynical politics don't fit yours, you can also enjoy the film as simply a bit of stylishly shot, nicely acted, hardboiled noir.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
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
While the cast is consistently watchable and on-point, Dominik disappoints as both scenarist and filmmaker.
Pitt, entering his third decade of fame, continues to show how there was always a deadly serious actor in him all along.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
There is not one moment in the film that doesn't represent the director's carefully considered thought, whether we're talking about acting values, camera placement, sound or style of presentation.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's hard to deglamorize the criminal life when you can't resist showing a bullet leaving a gun barrel in stylized super-slow motion or scoring the anti-hero's first entrance to a Johnny Cash song.
It has a weird, buzzing, intense quality that has burrowed its way deep into my brain like some invasive sci-fi organism.
The writer-director becomes so intent on hammering home the parallels between economic decay, political disappointments and petty criminals, there is nothing soft, or subtle, about it. He should trust his audience more.
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| Original Score: 3/5
This is a deeply cynical movie, with not much to say but a lot to feel.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Languorous to the point of rambling, the story of double-crossing and vengeance is darkly funny, graphically violent and gorgeously shot.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's the characters, and their words, that drive the story here, and Dominik preserves all their scruffy colors ...
The film, for all its visual felicities, comes to life only sporadically.
Clever dialogue can make up for one-dimensional characters, and amped-up action can disguise a thin plot. Here, we get too little of either.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Jolting, suspenseful, full of twisted sympathy for its goons' row of characters, and wickedly amusing to boot, Killing Them Softly summons up the ghosts of Goodfellas and a whole nasty tradition of crime pics.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A bleakly comic, brutally Darwinian gangland saga that at times comes close to being this year's "Drive."
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The Louisiana locations are appropriately cruddy, and the occasional scenes of violence are frightening, visceral, and beautifully photographed.
Killing Them Softly is 2012's answer to Mean Streets.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The movie is more concerned with conjuring an aura of meaningfulness than with actually meaning anything.
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| Original Score: 2/5
The acting is aces, especially Pitt mixing it up with the superb James Gandolfini, as an assassin losing his game to hooch and hookers. They make this movie a potently nasty provocation.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Dominik turns this potentially gritty crime flick into a soggy political metaphor for the 2008 financial crisis.
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| Original Score: 2/4
This is a talkative picture, allowing time and space for comically preoccupied and quirkily pathetic exchanges between all sorts of strays and losers.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It seems as if I've been seeing versions of this story since forever.
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| Original Score: 2/4
One of the best things in the movie is a conversation between Pitt and Jenkins, on a torrential day, seated in a nondescript car beneath a bridge.
The point of this vile, cynical and ultimately preposterous film is that America is reeling from spiritual numbness and ethical paralysis, and optimism is a game for fools.
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.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The scenes between Pitt and Gandolfini are the highlights of "Killing," with the two actors pivoting off each other with the ease and precision of gymnasts.
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| Original Score: 3/4
And at the end, when that character collides head on with the election theme Dominik tends to overstate throughout, it all leads up to a punch line so thoroughly anti-inspirational and mordantly funny and just about perfect ...
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| Original Score: 4/5
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.
Grimly amusing then shockingly brutal.
Dominik's frontal critique of US-style capitalism may be facile, but it gives the movie a bristling anger and a more lasting burn than other recent offerings in the same genre.
Possesses a modicum of swagger and style, even as it perpetuates some of the crime genre's more tedious cliches, from slow-motion savagery to facile cynicism.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
It pulls off the clever trick of operating as a gangster movie - featuring characters with missions to complete and people to kill - while at the same time sarkily undermining these same folk, attributing them with a heavy dose of incompetence.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Despite enough pummeling to flatten Rocky Balboa in all six movies, the only thing that truly rewards your attendance is Pitt in another effortless star performance.
In Killing Them Softly, Dominik's first feature since The Assassination of Jesse James, Pitt once again plays a quietly powerful sociopath, and once again the screen vibrates.
A juicy, bloody, grimy and profane crime drama that amply satisfies as a deep-dish genre piece, Killing Them Softly rather insistently also wants to be something more.
