8. Killing Them Softly (2012)
"Brad Pitt as a mob hitman" sounds like it's going to be a real winner of a film from that brief synopsis alone, but things don't always pan out in the ways we imagine they will - lest us not forget
Prometheus, people. Granted, some people more have been expecting a slow-ish movie, given that
Killing Them Softy was helmed by Australian director Andrew Dominik, who also went ponderous and snaillike with
The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford. Whereas that movie felt deserving of its pacing, though,
Killing Them Softly drowns in a kind of mind-numbing boredom brought on by characters who talk, talk, talk, talk, talk and talk (and talk). This might have been good, ala Tarantino, had they been talking about either the plot, or things we hadn't already been told in the last conversation. The fact that this movie is only 97 minutes long is shocking: when it's up, you feel like you've been staring at it for almost three hours. It starts fantastically, only to end up as a guaranteed cure for insomnia.