10 Brilliant Films That Were Intentionally Boring

10. Killing Them Softly (2012)

459494

After only about five people paid to see Andrew Dominik‘s beautifully poetic The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, the popular belief was that any director in that position would follow up his ambitious financial failure with something more commercial. While Killing Them Softly had far more public appeal than Jesse James, Dominik fortunately made another film unafraid to polarize.

Based on the 1974 novel Cogan's Trade by George V. Higgins, Killing Them Softly follows three idiotic individuals who think they're smart and rob a Mob protected card game, causing the local criminal economy to collapse. Brad Pitt plays the enforcer hired to track them down and restore order.

Killing Them Softly isn't your typical Hollywood crime drama. It’s much slower and more calculated, while also revealing its own secondary agenda -- a parallel between the 2008 financial crisis and the fiscal--driven nature of the narrative. But the film is far from simply a political diatribe. Its primary mission is to deliver bone-cracking violence and funny, profanity-driven tough-guy dialogue, and it does that quite well.