Killing Them Softly (2012)

In 2008, as the American economy buckled and a presidential campaign reached its crescendo, Andrew Dominik took George V. Higgins's 1974 crime novel and dragged its rot into the present. The result is a lean neo-noir about a mob poker game robbed by three incompetent men, and a hitman named Jackie Cogan hired to restore order to a criminal economy that has ground to a halt. The metaphor is not subtle. The syndicate is a market, its violence is regulation, its collapse is a credit crunch, and its members discuss percentages and fees with the flat affect of men reading quarterly earnings.

Dominik does not trust the audience to assemble this alone, so he intercuts the action with televised speeches from Barack Obama and George W. Bush, then closes the proceedings with Jackie declaring that America is not a country but a business. The critique lands with the grace of a dropped anvil. It is also the only idea the film cares to pursue. Every scene bends toward the ledger, every killing is itemized, and the closing argument arrives in dialogue so plain it could be read aloud at a shareholders' meeting. As cultural commentary goes, the thing is efficient, joyless, and impossible to miss.

The social imagination here is narrow by design and by omission. The cast is a closed society of white men in dark rooms. Women drift through as prostitutes, silhouettes, and destinations, and the film grants them no interior life. Race enters only as ambient noise from the election coverage, a grim joke about civic rhetoric that never becomes an argument. Addiction is a venal habit, not a diagnosis. There is no environmental conscience, no interest in identity, no revisionist account of the era. Left standing is a single sustained gripe. The economy is a protection racket, and everyone inside it is paying tribute.