Wednesday, April 13, 2016

A to Z Challenge: Killing Them Softly/Cogan's Trade

I said at the beginning that K was a hard one for whatever reason.  So after some research I found out that Killing Them Softly is based on the book Cogan's Trade from the 70s.  I hope the book is better than the movie, because the movie sucked ass.

The plot of the movie was a couple of bumbling idiots knock over a mob card game.  The mob is pissed and sends in Brad Pitt.  But he wusses out and brings in James Gandolfini, except Gandolfini is a drunk mess and so Pitt ends up doing it himself so easily that all I could wonder is why the fuck he didn't do it a long time ago.  Meanwhile Ray Liotta gets killed because he previously had a card game get robbed so everyone thinks he was in on it when he wasn't.

From Amazon reviews, the book I guess has a lot of dialogue in it.  It sounds like if Elmore Leonard wrote Richard Stark's Parker series.  If it wasn't $9.99 for the Kindle version maybe I'd read it.

Here's what I wrote about the movie in my April 2013 recap post:
Killing Them Softly:  I really dodged a bullet when this went out of theaters in two weeks when I might out of boredom gone to see it.  Who'd have thought a movie about an assassin hired to kill guys who robbed an underground poker game could be so boring?  It's over 20 minutes until Brad Pitt shows up in the movie and then we spend another 30 minutes on an entirely pointless subplot where he tries to recruit James Gandolfini to kill this guy he's done some work for in the past--except James Gandolfini never does it and Brad Pitt does the job so easily that why didn't he bother doing it right off the bat?  It's the same thing in the beginning where this guy grills this Australian guy about whether he's qualified for the robbery job and then a few minutes later says, "I don't care who you take; anyone could do this job."  Then why were you going on and on about how you were going to carefully screen people for the job?  It just seemed like padding to get it to 90 minutes.  Definitely one you can miss.

2 comments:

Tony Laplume said...

It would help my cause to state I'm a fan of this movie...

Random Musings said...

I haven't seen the movie or read the book, but after this review, I have to say I'm glad about that!
Debbie

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