Review of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007) by Melvin W — 22 Jul 2011

"No one was supposed to get hurt".

It was supposed to go down perfect. It was supposed to be easy. But robberies never end up being as perfect as they are supposed to be. Before The Devil Knows You're Dead is another example of that. Hell, Lumet has done a robbery gone wrong before with Dog Day Afternoon. Before The Devil Knows You're Dead is a great movie and a great ending to Lumet's career. The film is done out of order, which can sometimes seem cheap and gimmicky. Here it doesn't. Everything works well in the order that Lumet wanted it to be shown. We see how the robbery went down in the second scene. From there we don't know where the story is going to go. It's unpredictable and that's what I loved about it. It wasn't a movie where you had a good idea what was going to happen in the next scene. I had no idea and that not knowing kept me in suspense for the entire film.

The film obviously has a talented director behind it with one of the best in the business, Sidney Lumet. The man is a complete genius. He brought us such classics as Network and Dog Day Afternoon. The movie also has one of my favorite actors in it and that would be Philip Seymour Hoffman. He's a terrific actor and he's as good as ever in his role here. He plays an out of control character perfectly. Another actor who I can take or leave, Ethan Hawke, gives probably is best performance. I wouldn't have thought he could pull a character like Hank off, but he does convincingly.

If the movie has a flaw it would be that one of the characters isn't completely wrapped up in the end. We don't know what happens to him in the end. Maybe we don't really need to know because the ideas of the movie are wrapped up. We see where greed, recklessness and bad decisions got the characters in the end and I believe that everything that we needed to see, we saw. .

This is probably my third favorite Lumet movie behind Dog Day Afternoon and Running On Empty. The man really did have an extraordinary career. I think him making a final masterpiece with Before The Devil... is quite fitting. .