"A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges."This quote, from founding father Benjamin Franklin, doesn't appear anywhere in Killing Them Softly, but I think it sums up the movie fairly succinctly.
From all outward appearances and marketing, Killing Them Softly is yet another entry in the never out of style gangster genre, a genre which is one of the most well-established perennials of American cinema. Don't fool yourself though, this film ain't Heat. It's not Donnie Brasco either, or The Untouchables, or even Goodfellas. In terms of accessibility, Killing Them Softly is a much pricklier pear than these relatively straightforward films.
By way of plot, there is very little. Not much actually happens in the movie when you break it down step by step (which may partly be due to its brisk run time of 97 minutes). There's a lot of dialogue, all superbly written and acted, but it doesn't necessarily lead to any plot revelations or narrative expansion. Instead, what we get from all this conversational back and forth is mostly tangential chatter, tangential chatter which is used in service of the film's true goal: an allegory on the current state of the good ol' US of A.
