Amongst the less easy-to-pin films of Cannes thus far is Andrew Dominik's follow-up to "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford". To be honest, if they told me "Killing Them Softly" was just a contemporary update of that previous work, I'd believe them. This has been a difficult film to follow, due to an uncertainty over how it will turn out. But as the festival keeps moving ever forward, we keep hearing positive, if not overly ecstatic, receptions. Somehow that feels worst than having several major disappointments, but we'll learn to forgive. That's where this film stands, not quite at being "hit of the festival", and instead being rather simply agreeable.
Todd McCarthy (Hollywood Reporter): "The film noir crime dramas of the late 1940s and early 1950s were about a palpable unease in the country, but this remained a subtext rather than the overt subject of the films. Here, Dominik explicitly articulates his intended meanings, which have to do with money, institutional rot and what happens when you don’t keep your economic house in order. Either approach is valid but, perhaps in this day and age, audiences need their messages to be quick and direct. Killing Them Softly delivers them that way."
