Mind you, it seems unlikely that Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn), the two stringy-haired losers we meet first in “Killing Them Softly,” have any idea who Barack Obama is or what the hell is happening on Wall Street. (Other than the fact that guys in good clothes are making money and they're not, perhaps.) A loudmouth wannabe crime boss named Johnny Amato (Vincent Curatola, aka Johnny Sack from “The Sopranos”) talks them into sticking up a mob-sponsored poker game run by Markie Trattman (the ever creepier Ray Liotta), a mid-level operator who somehow survived an episode in which he robbed his own game years earlier. Johnny’s assumption is that the bosses will take out their frustration on Markie, shrug off the losses and move on. Like low-level financial gamesters the world over, he is unable to see the future beyond his next few thousand bucks, and his assumption is only partly correct. 
 
 I’ve already made it sound way too much as if “Killing Them Softly” was driven by plot. In fact the story largely follows a mostly predictable arc and the experience of watching it is dominated by the scum-coated, rain-soaked cityscapes (photographed by the suddenly hot Aussie cinematographer Greig Fraser, who also shot Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty”), the deliberately disorienting point-of-view shots and the eruptions of gruesome violence, often seen in poetic slow motion. Jackie gets to town to clean up the mess left behind by Markie, Johnny, the two deadbeat thieves and pretty much everybody else, and finds himself uniformly disappointed and let down. His principal point of contact is an apologetic middle-manager type played by the reliably terrific Richard Jenkins, who approaches the challenges of organized crime with a Dilbert-like lack of fervor. It’s a business like any other, and you have to deal with jerks. Both he and Jackie seem to work for a boss named Dillon, who makes only one brief appearance (a cameo for Sam Shepard) and then disappears altogether. ||||| Brad Pitt is the dissatisfied hit man Jackie Cogan in Killing Them Softly. 
 
 Brad Pitt Alliance Films Brad Pitt is the dissatisfied hit man Jackie Cogan in Killing Them Softly. 
 
 Killing Them Softly 
 
 (out of 4) 
 
 Starring Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins, Ray Liotta, Ben Mendelsohn and Scoot McNairy. Written and directed by Andrew Dominik. 97 minutes. Opens Nov. 30 at major theatres. 18A 
 
 This is the dead land 
 
 This is cactus land 
 
 —T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men 
 
 They are indeed empty vessels, these drained gangsters of Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly. 
 
 They’re guys who would steal a waiter’s $1 tip, and for whom $1,000 might as well be $1 million. They drink to excess and whore around, but achieve little satisfaction from either escape. 
 
 They have vacant eyes, zombie hearts and zero conscience. They will pull a trigger, smash a face or betray a pal, but there’s no serious intent. There’s just opportunity, money and, above all, business. 
 
 Business has been bad lately. It’s the fall of 2008 in post-Katrina New Orleans, and despite the constant chatter about “the American promise” from presidential candidate Barack Obama, few people are dreaming big. 
 
 It’s a time of hesitation, doubt and fear. Gangsters drive around in 40-year-old gas guzzlers and walk tiny dogs. They’re feeling the pinch as keenly as the bankers who have driven the economy into the dirt. 
 
 “This country is f---ed, I’m telling you,” says mob hit man Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt), who is disgusted by what he sees. He still possesses a modicum of self-respect, but it’s started to fade. He has to clean up the mess of incompetent dirty work. 
 
 He sees idiots like Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) doing idiotic things like knocking over a backroom poker game between members of the mob. The game is run by another idiot, Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), who previously arranged to have another of his mob games robbed and bragged about it. Guess who is going to be blamed for this one? 
 
 There are elements of Scorsese’s grime and Tarantino’s wit in Killing Them Softly, and the story source is the 1974 novel Cogan’s Game by George V. Higgins. But writer/director Dominik has his own methods. He’s brilliant at using atmosphere and attitude to set up a scene, as he also showed in Chopper and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. 
 
 This is a deeply cynical movie, with not much to say but a lot to feel. Everything sinks into your bones, like the watered-down colours of cinematographer Greig Fraser’s palette. Like the deep funk of Pitt’s disillusioned Cogan. Like the economic meltdown that siphons wallets and then souls. 
 
 Obama’s talk of “hope” and “change” blares from every blurry barroom TV screen, as well as George W. Bush’s final excuses, but nobody here is feeling energized. 
 
 There’s an election coming, but also a reckoning: Johnny Cash’s apocalyptic “The Man Comes Around” plays on the soundtrack, and that man isn’t Jesus, it’s Cogan. 
 
 He’s been hired to settle a few scores regarding the poker-game robbery. He gives the film’s title meaning as he describes his technique: “I like to kill them softly, from a distance. Not close enough for feelings.” 
 
 But he’s feeling something: frustration. His fellow enforcer (James Gandolfini), whom he’s summoned to town for assistance, seems more interested in getting smashed and laid. 
 
 Cogan’s mob contact Driver (Richard Jenkins) keeps sweating the details of the planned hits, and also the cost (“Fly coach”). 
 
 Bullets will eventually fly and blood will flow. The victims will hardly have time to feel pain. 
 
 It’s nothing new, but it’s smartly done, with slow-motion scenes mirroring the blurred states of mind. 
 
 “Crime is the business of America,” Cogan says, but we’ve already noted that business ain’t good. 
 
 Killing Them Softly, however, is very good.
– Killing Them Softly, starring Brad Pitt as a jaded gangster, is a seedy tale of hopelessness in a world of theft, revenge, and plenty of violence. It's a worthwhile watch, though it doesn't quite achieve its goals: With "elements of Scorsese's grime and Tarantino's wit," the film is "nothing new, but it’s smartly done," writes Peter Howell in the Toronto Star. It's "a deeply cynical movie, with not much to say but a lot to feel. Everything sinks into your bones." The film offers an "agreeably scuzzy, small-time feeling," notes AO Scott in the New York Times. But it's "sapped of vitality by its own self-conscious, curatorial fastidiousness. It takes place entirely in a universe of tropes and archetypes, which is a polite way of saying clichés and pretensions." At Salon, Andrew O'Hehir didn't exactly "enjoy" the movie, but then, it's "a deliberately chilly and nerve-wracking experience, and one of the bleakest portraits of American society seen on-screen in the last several decades," he writes. Indeed, it "suffers from a nearly terminal case of undergraduate nihilist philosophy ... reaching for grand existential meaning and not quite getting there." At USA Today, Claudia Puig is less equivocal, calling the film "a stylish thriller worth seeing—despite its relentless violence—for its sharp dialogue, mesmerizing photography, and gritty performances."