KILLING THEM SOFTLY

Which was precisely what the audience suffered through 97 minutes of this brutal, taut expose where all are nefarious; just varying degrees of separation. The once, remarkably handsome Brad Pitt, plays philosophical “gun-for-hire”, “Jackie Cogan” who “kills” from a distance, so as not to get too personal, sentimentally involved; his creed is ambushed by circumstances and his assassinations spread blood as intensely as water in post-Katrina , New Orleans.

Director Andrew Dominik features a seasoned cast (Pitt, Richard Jenkins, Ray Liotta, James Gandolfini, Scott McNairy) in a glum, lugubrious plot, revolving around the financial woes of dismal, droll, untoward individuals.

It is 2008, and the strokes of visual and audio irony, referencing the waning days of the Bush administration, the implosion of the housing bubble and the platitudinous,  prophetic rise of Barak Obama, lend minimal humor and legitimacy to the oh-so-sorrowful -scenario.

There is nothing, or no one to champion; just insignificant, worthless, unwashed villains (whose redolent, imagined pungent scent, triggered olfactory hallucinations), focusing on the indelible code of the underworld; it is a business, rules known and ruthlessly enforced; ambitiously, erroneously, paralleled with the United States, “Killing Them Softly”  could not conclude fast or hard enough for me.

TWO STARS!!

For Now………….Peneflix