“Great” Scott’s Greater
than Great DVD Review of Killing Them Softly (2012)
Title
Killing Them Softly
IMDB
Page
One-Sentence
Summary
Three morons with no backstory
rob a card game run by the mob, so the mob sends Brad Pitt to kill them…softly.
What’s
Great About It
The acting is solid…and the
soundtrack is good.
What’s
Not-So-Great About It
Pretty much everything else is
horrible. Scenes take forever to end; I
don’t care about any of the characters; the story is about as bland and “from
point A to point B” as it gets; and the director is clearly trying to cram in as
many “look what I learned in film school” things as he can.
Rating
Gg (1.5 out of 5)
Explanation
Boy oh boy, where to begin. First, let’s get the good out of the
way. Every person in this movie plays
their role admirably. Brad Pitt, as mob
enforcer Jackie Cogan, does a great job and you can tell he isn’t even trying. Ray Liotta plays a sniveling weasel as good
as anyone. James Gandolfini is excellent
as a drunken, sex-crazed, not-so-great-anymore hitman. The two guys who play the lead roles are
lesser-known actors, but both do a job of playing idiots really well.
That’s about where things go
south. We get no backstory on either of
the two dimwit robbers except that one is currently stealing dogs to make
enough money to buy drugs to sell…other than that, there’s really no reason to
want to see these guys succeed or fail…I didn’t even NOT like them…I couldn’t
have cared less. The same holds true
with Brad Pitt’s character…he seemed like a better guy than the two morons, but
I still didn’t really care, in the grand scheme of things.
The worst part of this movie is
that scenes went on for evvvvvveeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Dear Lord, this script must’ve been three
million pages long, or the actors were paid to ad lib by the word. The worst part was that most of these verbose
scenes had nothing to do with the plot.
I got that Gandolfini’s character was a sex addict after the first five
minutes he talked about it…the next 15 minutes were overkill.
Lastly, the director of this
movie included so many things that just shouted, “Look at what I can do!” Normally, I don’t spoil movies, but this
movie spoiled my evening, so I’m going to return the favor. One example is when Ray Liotta gets killed;
his death is so overblown that I couldn’t help but laugh. Another scene involves one of the idiot
robbers trying to ask his friend some questions while his friend is stoned…the
effects used to show the “stonedness” are cool for all of about two minutes…the
next five or six minutes of it grate on the nerves.
So, if you’re up for a caper
movie, go watch Usual Suspects, even
if you’ve seen it already. Or, watch the
one part of Pulp Fiction again, the
part where they rob the diner. Or, if
you simply MUST see Brad Pitt in a caper movie, watch any of the Ocean’s movies…even Ocean’s Twelve, which was sorta’ terrible. Even it was better than this.
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