Review of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007) by Chris U — 18 May 2009

Sidney Lumet is the Phil Jackson of film directors: when he's got the best players in the game (Henry Fonda, Al Pacino, Albert Finney, Philip Seymour Hoffman), he delivers good work ("12 Angry Men", "Serpico", "Dog Day Afternoon", "Network"). When he's stuck with the likes of Melanie Griffith, Don Johnson, Sharon Stone, et al, he proves himself to be rather fallible ("A Stranger Among Us", "Gloria", "Guilty As Sin", for instance).

"Before The Devil Knows You're Dead" is a solid, if unspectacular entry in the already overpopulated heist genre. It is able to achieve its modest aims only by virtue of having top-notch talent like the aforementioned Hoffman & Finney, Ethan Hawke, and Amy Ryan to give life to what is a fairly formulaic script. It is a script that attempts to mask its rather conventional and predictable narrative by simply presenting many scenes out of chronological sequence, and from multiple points-of-view.

But where the trick of a disjointed narrative is wielded with surgical precision by Tarantino in "Pulp Fiction" or Christopher Nolan in "Following", Lumet instead wields his instrument a bit more bluntly and deliberately. It doesn't make this movie bad--the actors involved all turn in performances too good to let that happen--but it does invite unflattering comparisons to far superior films.