Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on April 2013

Of all the movies about mob hit men, etc., few are more gritty, unglamorous or wickedly amusing than this stylish adaptation by Andrew Dominik of George V. Higgins’s Cogan’s Trade. Dominik’s previous effort was The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which I thought was well made but offputtingly art-house. Less so this sideways look at the daily business of being a hood. Hit men too apparently have to work at a discount in this bad economy. Who knew? Brad Pitt’s charismatic-but-callous assassin character has had it about up to here with the banality of the corporate-type mob committees (represented by Richard Jenkins) that must approve each whack. Is organized crime just capitalism in a more raw form? Effective appearances by Ray Liotta and James Gandolfini remind us that we’re not far from GoodFellas or The Sopranos territory, but gangster-action-flick fans may find this dialogue-driven effort a bit slow (filmmakers prefer “deliberately paced”). Be warned, however, that when it turns violent, it’s pretty explicit. Ingeniously, all this dystopian savagery and nihilistic notions is thought-provokingly played against an overlay of Obama’s hope-and-change philosophy during the 2008 presidential campaign. Hey, it’s just business.