The rought cut ran for 150 minutes and I find that very beautiful and tragic, but also questionable, and this comes from another defender of Dominik's previous film. He is a very interesting director when he fuses the brutality of the human nature with visual poetry. Killing Them Softly is a case where the aesthetics compensate flaws: excellent soundtrack, gorgeous visuals, a swaying cinematography difficult to replicate, and an anti-political, anti-corporativist message.

Nevertheless, this film had me in constant up and downs. Throughout, I went to "that is brilliant writing" to "that is atrocious writing", back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, with a wasted Ray Liotta and a Brad Pitt that even seemed facially embarrassed to deliver the awkward lines he had to utter sometimes. At other times, however, his character seemed menacing, cold and ruthless. He just had to resort to his usual facial expressions to add personality to such a mysterious character. It is also easily noticeable who are acting amateurs and who are veterans, but this is not a guarantee that the veterans will have good scenes. I feel that the "hardest" parts to enjoy for the western audience were left out, leaving pieces of writing that could be improved by a film student and chopping almost full hour of valuable introspection.

It does feel like a cut product, because the insight given for each character was particularly strong for then leaving them out or simply granting them an anticlimactic closure.

Painfully, the message it wants to convey is terrific, but it is so hardly shoved down our throats that it becomes repetitive to a degree that becomes intolerable. Suddenly, the entire town has a fixation with listening to presidential speeches in TV and the radio about "America's current financial crisis" and "we are not a collection of individuals, but we are one in our nation", with a preposterous emphasis on the former. The intension is very smart: the highest political spheres communicate a message of economic struggle with a taint of false positivism. The film plays with the irony of a nation fighting against a financial crisis while ignoring that it also affects the criminal economy; the wealth of a nation is extremely correlated with the wealth of the Mob and it is no coincidence. This is a smartly thought, but not written, open condemnation against the perpetrators of this system and the manipulation of laws and reforms. However, it insists so much upon it that said impulse is lost and we're left only with, again, a cut product, storywise and character-development-wise.

What remains? A film full of dread with a fascinating development, fantastic scenes, and a pace drenched in dredd and suspense. Crime films rarely get as realistic and grim as this, where violence exploding is actually a visceral event to behold, not an entertaining one. We see a world plagued by characters thinking that the United States is solely run by people that think only about themselves, and this is very true in all countries around the world in a generalized way. All characters play by those rules, and it is overwhelmingly existentialist and selfish. The film excels at the portrayal of how the younger generations pursuing the "American dream" through criminal and illegal acts are adopted by morally rotten people that can barely handle their own lives. However, both the "justice" authorities and the Mob must run as organized enterprises in order to work, and this one, comedically at least for me, is a mess, which is reflected back into the nation.

It is not the first time I see a film portraying a macro event and a micro event running simultaneously. This is the Nth time, and I am quite surprised that Dominik lost his focus while writing the screenplay because he has already adapted a novel successfully before.

Mind you, this is much better than the average crime flick, with more brains, visual quality and thematic content than most, and there is a reason for that Palme d'Or nomination; it just tries too hard. There is one scene where there are TWO cars in the same shot listening to the same Barack Obama speech, so the speech overlaps, and when one car is turned off, you still hear the speech from the other car. Too hard, I tell you.

73/100