In the first five minutes of this movie you’re confronted with a full blown sex scene, featuring a pretty Oscar winner, and a bloody murder. Sets the mood quite nicely. Without spoiling anything, the plot goes as following: two brothers urgently need money and plan to rob a jewellery store. Minor detail; the store they have in mind is owned by mom and dad. Since the movie would be boring if all went nicely to plan, plenty of chaos follows.

It’s hard to see Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke being brothers in real life, they’re just too different looking. As movie brothers however, they do a fine job. Both obviously don’t like each other very much, the only reason they’re still in touch is because they’re blood related. Hoffman is married to Marisa Tomei, who’s not entirely satisfied with their relationship as she’s sleeping with Hawke as well. Every thursday, during lunch time, more specifically. Hoffman does a good job looking very unhealthy, and Hawke is excellent as a very unstable person trying to cope with life’s many difficulties. Marisa Tomei’s character could have been pivotal in the movie, but is underused. That said, she does a very good job with her allocated screen time and manages to look pretty distraught by the events, even though the reasons for her actions (or better, lack thereof) aren’t always clear. The relationships she sustains with both brothers seems a bit far-fetched as well. She might as well have had an affair with someone other than the brother of her lover, but probably the script writers didn’t think that would be clever enough.

To make things even more complicated, the movie isn’t shown in chronological order. Ever since a certain Christopher Nolan scored big with this flashback thing, many people have copied it and hoped for the same kind of success as attained by Memento. Every flashback, sometimes shown multiple times from different angles, reveals more information and an increasing complexity. You can’t help but wonder thinking Lumet should have stuck to the chronological order.

Unlike a typical heist movie you will not watch this to find out whether the robbers succeed in the robbery. This is revealed inside five minutes, so that leaves you with 85-something more minutes to keep your attention. Instead, this movie wants to keep you interested by making you wonder how the two brothers came up with the idea of robbing their parents. And secondly, you need to be curious about the way things end up with the boys after the robbery. After all, wouldn’t the parents find out? I won’t spoil it here, but the climax is a bit messy. One thing in particular really had me shaking my head in disbelief.

To conclude, this is a movie with a strong cast and a story which is potentially very interesting. However, for some reason, it doesn’t succeed completely. It’s not compelling enough. Too much time is spent explaining everything going on instead of trying to make you care more about the characters, some of which are shamefully underused.. You’ll have a good time watching this devil (as there’s some gruesome scenes), but don’t expect to be thinking about it a day after having seen it.