Fridae

Ray Liotta plays a mobster who operates a gambling den whose clientèle consists of mobsters. You'd think this guy has it made except his den gets held up by two low-level criminals who make off with cash, winnings, and the bank. If you've watched enough class noir, you'd know most heists are inside jobs and you'd expect the host to be on a hit list any time soon. Especially if he's foolish enough to have actually masterminded a previous heist on his own den a year ago and bragged about it. The mob, while not having a smoking gun to pin the blame this time round, engages the very professional and effective mob enforcer Cogan (Brad Pitt) — whose byline in the industry seems to be "killing them softly" — to investigate, clean up the mess, and execute the guilty and not-so-guilty.

On its own, Killing Them Softly is a genre film that you've probably seen in different variations on screen over the years. It's a methodical procedural, the twist being the investigator is a mob enforcer and the department he answers to is the mob. The twist beyond the twist apparently is the fact that just like in excellent Korean noirs like Mother, Memories of Murder and The Chaser, where the investigation is not that much about hauling up the actual perps and doing justice than reassuring the public that some form of action has been taken, usually by hauling up as a convenient scapegoat the unfortunate outsider whom nobody likes anyway.

As an adaptation, writer-director Andrew Dominik's decision to bring the novel's setting from the 1970s to the present day is a stroke of genius that outdoes what is already brilliant writing in the source material. Set in the months and weeks before Obama's election as president, the film's background track is dominated by speeches made by Bush, McCain, Obama, and Greenspan about the financial crisis that would lead to what we now call the Great Recession. The subtext, which often threatens to overpower the text, is the eerie parallels between the self-heist and the banking shenanigans that led to the crisis, as well as the political kabuki, bad faith dealings, less-than-competent crisis handling, and self-serving PR that intersect both the mob and government clean-up of their respective crises.

Deceptively simple and easily entertaining, Killing Them Softly is a darkly comic genre film that this age deserves.