Before The Devil Knows You're Dead

Rating: * * *

Verdict: Cleverly conceived thriller overplays its tricksy narrative but the acting is great.

In the 50 years since Sidney Lumet debuted with 12 Angry Men - a jury room thriller that has lost nothing with the passage of time - he's turned in some landmark pictures: The Anderson Tapes, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, The Verdict. His latest, while rich in pleasures, doesn't belong in that company.

It's a cleverly conceived thriller, thick with Oedipal overtones, and the acting is uniformly superb - although Hoffman, a usually likeable actor, shows the first unmistakable signs of mannerism, as if he's started to play himself.

But in quite overdoing the tricksy reverse-narrative approach that seems to have become compulsory for thrillers these days, the film tries to be smarter than it is - and, as a result, seems laboured and formulaic.

Meanwhile the ending (whose medical plausibility is pretty questionable anyway) simply and outrageously forgets about a major character.

Hoffman and Hawke play brothers Andy and Hank Hanson, both in financial strife: Andy supports some very bad habits by keeping one hand in the till of the real estate firm he manages and Hank, a kindly loser plainly used to being sneered at by his elder sibling, is months behind on his child support.  Then Andy hits on a perfect crime: they're going to rob a jewellery store, but not just any jewellery store.

It gives nothing away to say that it all turns to something a lot smellier than custard because we see that happening early on and it casts a pall over everything that follows. The script, by playwright Kelly Masterson making a screenplay debut, keeps scooping deeper into the past, to reveal, layer by layer, the archaeology of the crime and much of the time you can hear the plot's building blocks slot into place. But the acting keeps it afloat - Finney in particular, is marvellous as the boys' father, a man who decides to consume his rage before it consumes him - and with Lumet's sure hand on the helm it is never less than engrossing.

In the headlong final quarter as murder begins monstrously to beget murder, the initial whiff of Greek tragedy has turned to a stench. Perhaps it just proves Tolstoy's famous line about how "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"; perhaps it disproves it. Either way, it's less than the sum of some excellent parts.

 Peter Calder

 Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei, Albert Finney

Director: Sidney Lumet

Running time: 117 mins

Rating: R16, contains violence, offensive language, drug use and sex scenes

Screening: Rialto, Berkeley Takapuna