2012 crime drama
Rating: 15/20
Plot: A pair of losers decide to rob a high-stakes poker game, and Brad Pitt has to come to town to get to the bottom of things.
One could accuse this little anti-gangster flick of being all bombast and no real substance, but I really like what the actors (actors--I can only remember a single female character in this movie, and she wasn't important) did with these characters and how the writers decided to spend time with those characters. It takes the piss out of the gangster genre and the gangster archetype. Pitt's an anti-hero, and somebody a little less Pittish might have been better in the role. Not that I have anything against Brad Pitt, and he's not terrible here, but somebody extremely recognizable in a role like this kind of takes away from the character. I really liked his entrance in this movie though--he comes in boot-first to Johnny Cash's growly "The Man Comes Around." It's just about perfect. The other characters are also great, mostly because of how far away from anything close to great they are. Gandolfini plays an embarrassingly burnt-out hit-man and makes it seem like Gandolfini's been a turtle all his life and decided to play this role sans shell for the first time. Scoot McNairy (Scoot McNairy?) plays a character too odd to be real. He plays punk-ass loser in a way that makes Jesse's friends in Breaking Bad seem like men of substance. Australian Ben Mendelsohn plays a withered brown paper sack, and Richard Jenkins steps in to Richard Jenkins it all over the place. Oh, and Ray Liotta plays a guy named Markie, the sort of simultaneously tough and fragile guy that would be named Markie and they type of character that Liotta plays so well. It's an odd assortment of characters, and I like how on display they are in this movie. They don't hide from these characters' weaker moments. And no one's typical except for Pitt whose character seems to just want to do a job and is exasperated by everybody else. The style of this thing is always on the verge of being unbearable. There's ironic music selections, slow-motion cinematography, experimental imagery. It adds up to something that feels pretty fresh even when it's at its most Tarantino-esque. The violence--necessary--in this movie is unnecessarily unsettling. It all feels a little too real, and some of the accompanying sounds almost make it personal. So many sounds in this movie--distant factory sounds, clatterings, whirrs. It's like these characters are wandering around some sort of machine, and it adds to this wonderful greasy tension. And the dilapidated settings add to the mood, too. The fact that locations like this actually exist to film movies a little depressing. Speaking of tension, the actual robbery scene is almost unbearably tense. It's the type of scene where you just know something's going to go wrong, and then it doesn't go wrong, but the entire rest of the movie is about how exactly it all went wrong. On top of the narrative is an oppressive amount of references to McCain and Obama and the American economy. Notice I said "on top of the narrative" because that's accurate. It's hardly an undercurrent, this metaphor, and I'm having trouble knowing if I understood everything like I was supposed to or if I liked the heavy-handed approach. It almost got to the point where I suspected it was supposed to be allegorical. Anyway, it doesn't take away from an enjoyable ride with some interesting personalities and ultra-violence.
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