Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
Director: Sidney Lumet
Year Released: 2007
Rating: 1.5
Two brothers (Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman, both somewhat miscast) concoct a plan to rob their own parents' jewelry shop in Westchester for about $60k, but as with every other bank robbery picture in the last ten years, it goes wrong and (in this particular case) Mom gets killed. More banal than the point about the world being evil (and money being evil, and drugs being evil…) is the structure of the picture itself, which takes great pains to repeat itself over and over and over again, juggling several characters and their respective time frames to the point of exhaustion. It's a screenwriting gimmick that can either work wonderfully (Pulp Fiction being one case) or fail terribly. As for the greed of the brothers, couldn't they have just asked Ma & Pa for a loan?
