Killing Them Softly | Fast forward to...

Melinda Sue Gordon

Burdening its mean, lean gangster yarn with pretentious parallels to the financial crisis, Killing Them Softly is a big comedown for director Andrew Dominik, whose previous film was the glorious neo-Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. There is, however, at least one spectacular sequence in Softly: the card-game stickup that sets the plot into motion. Wearing makeshift panty-hose masks that scarcely disguise their amateur-hour desperation, two Louisiana lowlifes (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn) storm an underworld gamblers’ den. Dominik stages the robbery in nerve-racking real time, cutting between the scared-shitless faces of the crooks and the hardened features of their marks. (“You know they’re going to kill you?” asks an almost paternalistic Ray Liotta, trying to talk the boys out of it.) The scene is a model of crime-flick suspense. Pity about the tedious gabfest that follows. (Available on VOD, DVD and Blu-ray Tue 26.)