10 Glorious Deaths In Forgettable Films
5. Markie Bites The Bullet - Killing Them Softly
In Killing Them Softly, Brad Pitt would lead the stellar cast of James Gandolfini, Ray Liotta and Ben Mendelsohn with Andrew Dominik (linking up again with Pitt after The Assassination of Jesse James...).
Gifted with source material (George V. Higgins' Cogan's Trade) involving a hitman, Jackie Cogan (Pitt), hunting down the man responsible for a card game heist, you'd expect this neo-noir thriller to be oozing with style and to tee up a formidable comeuppance for anyone on the wrong side of Cogan.
Only one of those things was delivered.
Killing Them Softly is a slow paced slog of a film that tries to steal components from better movies in the same genre, only to deliver a mis-match of devices that don't want to belong in the same movie.
Case in point being the death that makes this list.
Pitt's Cogan drifts slowly, in the back seat of a car, past Liotta's Markie - the man wrongly assumed to be the orchestrator of the card heist - and blasts Markie through his own car window. The scene is slowed down to a beautifully enhanced slo-mo exchange where we see each bullet ricochet out of Cogan's pistol as the music slumbers into the moment. With each impending smash of the shots fired through the agonisingly shattered glass, Markie's face is punctured and his blood is splattered towards us.
The death is mesmerising but it clashes with the more naturalistic violence we see throughout the flick and feels oddly out of place.
Nevertheless, it's still managed to stand out as the most rewatchable aspect of a feature that few recount even being released.