Killing Them Softly

This isn't going to change your life, but it can kill some of your time. You might want to imagine this as a Coens black comedy but without much in the way of playful ruses or clever deconstruction that characterize their best work.

Sure enough, Pitt and Jenkins were together in Burn After Reading, which aimed for a similar effect—trivial lives destroyed in petty schemes, and all that chaos and human buffoonery as a celestial poker game between callous, indifferent gods.

The idea is that the world has been broken for some time now, caused by greed and selfishness. In the film, years ago a mob acquaintance robbed his own poker game and got away with it. This opens the ground for street punks to try it.

It happens again only this time with complete incompetence. No one really cares about honor or friendship or even the truth of the thing, except the corporate guys who now run the show are paying for someone to take care of loose ends and public appearance.

So, this paid for violence swoops into these lives and blindly wrecks everything.

It is brutal to watch, but no one here is innocent. Only the drug-addled fool who got everyone into this mess is spared with prison time, because the laughing gods always take care of their court jester, who half-lives in divine hallucination, and is probably not even going to know the difference.

But, Dominik is just too square for this. He insists on serious politics instead of letting us infer it. He pitches some of it as clowning, but then has elegiac Cash on the soundtrack and the filming emphasizes soft urban squalor. There is a baffling slow-motion scene, empty bravura.