KILLING THEM SOFTLY (R) Two low-level criminals (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn) rob a mob-run poker game. Professional hit man Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) is hired to clean the mess up.

Set in 2008, in a pre-election America in economic free fall, New Zealand director/writer Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly plays rough. It's a stylistically ambitious crime movie (based on the George V. Higgins' novel Cogan's Trade) filled with scuzzy murderers and thieves vying for their slice of the big score, but the movie is weighed down by an aggressive literal-mindedness that smothers any vitality struggling to get out. It's not all a wash, however, and what works here (the performances and its gritty, burned-out look) continues to remind us of how talented Dominik is underneath the brooding lecturing. His earlier movie with Pitt, the moody character-driven epic Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, was likewise heavy with atmosphere and brazenly embraced the tropes of its genre with no apologies. In that movie, which frequently felt like it would sink beneath its own mythic self-importance, Dominik and his lead actors, Pitt and Casey Affleck, nevertheless managed to generate depth out of the stateliness.

Killing Them Softly isn't nearly as artistically successful. Dominik strains to relate the 2008 economic crises to the plight of his motley crew of cutthroats. Whether it's blaring from a bar television set or a car radio, news broadcasts constantly remind us that the government bailout is just one big swindle run by Wall Street hoodlums and elected officials. Cogan and others glumly comment on the proceedings, and Dominik hammers home the cynicism like a righteous 15-year-old who's just discovered that the world isn't fair. There's an incoherency to Dominik's approach to violence as well. As in his earlier work, particularly Chopper, violence is depicted with a savage intensity that strives to leave a psychic scar on us. Ray Liotta's beating in a downpour is harrowing stuff, but Dominik can't resist amping up his stylistic tricks either (the drive-by shooting sequence), that philosophically undermines whatever seriousness he's going for. Sure, violence is awful, but isn't it cool to watch the blood flow? Somewhere embedded in this mess is a great crime movie. But you're better off watching a far better earlier Higgins adaptation instead, The Friends of Eddie Coyle with Robert Mitchum.