Kill Me Now
Johnny "Squirrel" Amato (Vincent Curatola) has a plan on robbing a mafia card game as he knows that Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), who ran a poker ring, did this before, robbing his own poker game and than after getting away with it coming clean to his mates. But squirrel isn't going to get his hands dirty and hires Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) to do the dirty work for them, robbing Markie's game so he will become a suspect for having form. And all goes to plan except Mafia enforcer Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) is put on the case of dealing with who ever did the robbery and you don't want to call Cogan's bluff.
Ray Liotta in a movie with a Mafia connection should be worth a watch but I have to say that "Killing Them Softly" is a mind numbingly painful experience which to be brutally honest bored me from start to finish. But then I am not an American and it seems that this movie was only made for Americans as alongside this story we get a lot of commentary on the state of America and those in charge of the country who proclaim it is a community. The trouble is that I, like many, have little to no interest in the politics in America and so all the references to the politics in America ends up a boring distraction to what in truth is not an interesting movie anyway.
Now some people have praised the acting in "Killing Them Softly" and I suppose technically it is good but the characters themselves don't work as for me every single character is too over the top. There is nothing wrong with one or two full on characters but when every character is more of a caricature it doesn't work. It doesn't help that every character at one point or another gets some sort of political speech to make which seems even more false.
What this all boils down to is that "Killing Them Softly" is one of those movies which only seems to have been made for an American audience or only those who follow American politics. The sad thing is that when you remove all the politics from the movie there is little left other than caricatures and actors who just because of who they are might attract an audience.
