How is killing them softly

Some people have to take the hit. Maybe Jackie killed Frankie simply because he had to. That was his deal with Driver, to begin with. Jackie is a morally skeptic hero; he knows what is up and what means business. Frankie has to decide whether he would rat on Squirrel or take the hit himself, but he takes the former avenue. Frankie thinks he is leading Jackie to Squirrel, and that would be the end of it. But in reality, Jackie leads Frankie all the way, earning his trust bit by bit.

He even gives Frankie a choice to leave the car that Frankie bought with the stolen money and disappear. The chance is thin, and Jackie knows that.

And busting off another head means he can extract the money from Driver. So, as sad as it may sound, Frankie just becomes a speck in this social Darwinian mayhem.

His existence is distilled to near-insignificance. Above all, this is a story of America — more precisely white America — in a time when the first black President is ushering in a new era of hope. Is the hope strong enough to bear the burden of history? On the other hand, it is a time of despair, marked by a widespread economic collapse in the country.

In the end, Jackie goes back to Driver to receive his payment. There is some rambling and pointless exchanges with little pay-off. But there are some serious, reality sound bites that give us the same thing. There is that continuous backdrop of Political rambling rhetoric that mirrors the Character's innate ability to speak much and say little. This is an against the grain try at alternative, smart Cinema with just enough stylized graphic violence to make it obvious that this has Artistic commentary and not Documentary style Cinema Verite on its mind.

Overall it is a well done and interesting kind of side-step from the usual whiz-bang editing and shaky Camera stuff that has become so common. This is slow, bordering at times on tedious, but never a bore. It is well crafted but does not quite reach that level of great Prose transferred to great Film.

But it is a good try at a very difficult, rarely achieved process that creates the best of this kind of thing. LeonLouisRicci Apr 24, Details Edit.

Release date November 30, United States. United States. Cogan's Trade. Box office Edit. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 1h 37min. Dolby Digital Datasat. Related news. Sep 5 The Wrap. Contribute to this page Suggest an edit or add missing content. Edit page. So yeah, he wrote some lovely words and aroused the rabble, and they went out and died for those words while he sat back and drank his wine and fucked his slave girl.

Now fucking pay me. With said plague now well and truly upon us, our economy in shambles once more, our leadership utterly absconded from its responsibilities, and another bitter Presidential election just around the bend, there is no crime film—there is perhaps no film , period—more spiritually attuned to our current season in hell.

Advertisers: Contact Us. Privacy Policy. October 16, By Zach Vasquez. Article continues after advertisement. The facile point, I think, is that organized crime in America is troubled, just like the rest of the economy with a business slowdown and a growing recession. A genial guy named Markie Trattman Ray Liotta operates high-stakes poker games for the mob. One night the game is hit by two hooded stick-up men, who make off with a big pile of mob money. This in itself is suspicious, because it looks like an inside job: What outsider, even knowing about the secret game, would be crazy enough to steal from the mob?

Talk about crazy. Some time later, Markie, feeling in a good mood, tells the players that he arranged the job himself, robbing his own game. He finds this revelation so funny that tears run down his cheeks. A high-level mob boss named Mickey James Gandolfini arrives in town, hauling his in-flight luggage through the airport like a traveling businessman. He orders the executions of Russell and Johnny by a silky hit man named Jackie Brad Pitt , who likes to kill softly, as explained by one of the many aging classic songs on the soundtrack.

These are the first two of many, many mob-on-mob killings in the film, as the syndicate administers its own version of a bailout.