There's a scene in "Killing Them Softly" where Brad Pitt, playing Mafia enforcer Jackie Cogan, drives up alongside a car driven by a suspect gambling den operator (Ray Liotta) and pumps a few bullets into him. Here, and only here, director Andrew Dominik slows the film down to the extent that a couple of seconds play out over a couple of minutes, as glass shatters, hot lead flies and blood spurts in the most languid, almost erotic way.

Not that there's any particular reason to do so: It's a fetishizing of violence that's troubling in its sheer blissful pointlessness. Including the murder is justified: It's an integral part of the story. Showing it graphically may also be: You certainly want the viewer to experience the shock of the bloodletting. But stretching it out endlessly for every second of screen time you can wring from it is pathological. And of course — par the mentor, Quentin T. — there's an ironic pop song, Ketty Lester's 1962 hit "Love Letters," playing as the gore flows.

You can look at a film such as "Fallen Angels," where Wong Kar-wai plays with camera speeds to suggest the time-stopping experience of falling in love with someone. You could also look at something like "The Matrix," where the use of "bullet time" was not just a gimmick, but illustrated how enlightened hero Neo had literally transcended the laws of time and space. But Dominik's film reveals no narrative or artistic reason to go slo-mo for this killing other than that's what movies do nowadays: wallow in the carnage.