“Brad Pitt’s new film, Killing Them Softly, is, in many ways, a throwback to a kind of film that seemed to get made all the time in the 1970s and was regularly reinvented in the 1990s: a crime story in search of a moral center, and the kind of parabolic tale that is filled with skeezy characters and suspect schemes but simmers with the very modernist sense that something larger (and probably bad) is at work. Directed by Andrew Dominik and adapted from the 1974 novel Cogan’s Trade by George V. Higgins, the film nominally tells the story of a low-level criminal ecosystem that is suddenly disrupted when a couple of petty hoods (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn) are recruited to knock over a card game, setting off a chain of events that brings local commerce, as it were, to a halt. To fix the situation, a consortium of unseen overbosses dispatches Pitt’s character, an enforcer-for-hire named Jackie Cogan, to take the appropriate corrective measures so that business as usual can resume and everyone can start making money again.”
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