Killing Them Softly

When Mickey and Jackie are drinking together in the bar, Mickey drinks one of the two glasses of beer.

In the next shot, the glass is half full again.

At the beginning of the movie Russell and Frankie are discussing about the possibility of doing or not doing the coup.

Russell is eating an ice cream.

Suddenly in a next shot the ice cream is disappeared.

The movie is set in 2008, as evidenced by political ads, but a late model (2009 or later) white Mazda sedan can be seen on the street in one of the scenes.

After using his shotgun and putting it in the getaway car, Jackie wipes down the car of evidence but fails to retrieve his gun and his fingerprints on it.

When Trattman's car is hit by the tow truck, a close-up shows his head hitting and cracking the windshield.

The next exterior shot shows an intact windshield.

At one point in the movie Frankie mentions a bar in Haverhill.

He pronounces it "haver-hill" but anyone living in new England know it is pronounced "have-rill".

In the bar scene with Jackie and Mickey, the drinks on the table seem to be constantly changing.

The levels in the glasses change, the number of glasses on the table change and the arrangement of the glasses change.

When Brad Pitt's character shoots Ray Liota's character with a pistol through the car window, the ejected shell casing from the pistol is clearly that of a blank, as can be seen by the crimped end of the cartridge casing.

When the brothers Caprio drive upon the road and park at the right side of the road in which Markie Trattmans house is set, a white luxury car is seen on the left side of the road.

After a dialogue between the Carpio brothers a next shot of the street is shown when Markie Trattman drives down the road to park at the left side, this white luxury car disappears.

The sawn-off shotgun Russell has in the robbery scene would fail to work correctly, as there is no barrel.

If fired there would be no compression leading to the powder charge not burning correctly.

It wouldn't be effective as a weapon.

Just before his beat-down in the rain by Steve and Barry, Markie is sitting in the back seat of the car, completely dry.

In the very next scene, having just stepped out of the car, his hair is plastered to his head and his shirt is soaking wet.

Killing them softly is so close to being a great picture. The acting is great, and, although the film is commonly criticised for its pacing, i felt it to be superb.

In a nutshell I found it boring . It takes so long to get going and there are so many names mentioned that you only realise who they are just as the film is finishing..

When I heard they'd made a movie based on Cogan's Trade, I was eager to see it even tho the cockamamie title put me off. I consider Friends of Eddie Coyle to be one of the all-time classic gangster films & always wondered why none of George V Higgins' other crime novels had ever made it to film.

If they had cut back on the conversation and pretention, they might have saved some time for proper story telling....I wasn't so much bored as left thinking "is that it?

All around great acting and unique special effects.

Almost great.That's what this movie turned out to be.

This neo-noir crime-thriller, directed by Andrew Dominik and based on the novel 'Cogan's Trade' by George V. Higgins follows a story set in the fall of 2008 during the American financial crisis and the presidential election campaign, of Johnny Amato (played by Vincent Curatola) who hires two amateur criminals Frankie (played by Scott McNairy) and Russell (played by Ben Mendelsohn) to assist in a robbery of an illegal poker game run by Markie Trattman (played by Ray Liotta).

After the rarefied Assassination, with its rich period detail and earthy palette, Killing Them Softly seems rather Grey and even ordinary. It bypasses the last 20 years of post- Tarantino gangster movies to recall David Mamet's 1975 play American Buffalo, itself a meditation on recession-era crime and punishment.

This felt like something Guy Ritchie or Quentin Tarantino could have done. Plenty of similarities in tone and the whole construct of the film.