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Brad Pitt Prefers Killing Them Softly in International Trailer

"Have you ever killed anyone? They get touchy-feely."

For anyone that saw 2007's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, it shouldn't be any surprise that Killing Them Softly, which reunites Jesse James writer-director Andrew Dominik and Brad Pitt, is about more than just your average crime thriller.

Based on the 1974 novel Cogan's Trade by George V. Higgins, the Palme d'Or–nominated Killing Them Softly follows Pitt as mob point man Jackie Cogan, who is hired to investigate the heist of a mob-protected poker game. Co-starring James Gandolfini and Ray Liotta, the first trailer showed some of the humor that's filtered through the movie's hard-boiled characters, but in Interview (via The Playlist), Pitt revealed that Killing Them Softly is more than a tongue-in-cheek tale about hitmen and the mob.

Well, what Andrew wanted to do with this film was interesting: He wanted to talk about America — and America as a business — but he wanted to hide it within this low-end crime drama. We in America have some grand ideals — and some very strong ideals — but a lot of times, those ideals are used for marketing.

In a way, it's a call for responsible capitalism. But Andrew wanted to juxtapose that idea with the financial crisis and effects of that because there's an interesting psychology at play in terms of who we are and what we do when given too much room. At the end of the day, what it says is that we can't trust ourselves, that we need some governing body. But the old adage of capitalism is to make as much as you can for as little as possible. So, I mean, that's the simple arithmetic of it all, but there are these ethical questions at play.

Pitt admits that Killing Them Softly is a "political" movie, but says it won't come across as one. "Andrew does something really well in this film, which is that it's constructed so that you never know exactly what you're watching until the last scene," said Pitt.

That message certainly isn't apparent in the new international trailer below, which is more concerned with informing potential audiences on the criminal nature of the movie's plot.

Written and directed by Domenik, the cast of Killing Them Sofly also includes Scoot McNairy (Monsters), Ben Mendelsohn (Animal Kingdom) and Richard Jenkins (Burn After Reading).