When NZ-born, Oz-bred director Andrew Dominik last got Brad Pitt in his sights, the result was 2007's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the best Western in years.
Maybe some thought the title gave away the ending. But even Pitt, a man so marketable he now flogs perfume, couldn't attract anyone to go see it.
So on their second collaboration, Dominik and Pitt have gone back to what they know.
For the director, that's the seamy underworld he created in his Australian debut Chopper. For Pitt, it's another role in which he exudes several buckets of that cool, smart menace which has become as much his screen trademark as his early prettiness.
He's here as mob enforcer Jackie Cogan, the character coming from Cogan's Trade, a 1974 crime novel by George V. Higgins, on which Dominik loosely based his script, now updated to the time of the 2008 Bush-Obama handover and the snowballing GFC.
