Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)

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  Barneyonmovies

  8 / 10

  WHAT I LIKED: Fittingly for Sidney Lumet's final film, Kelly Masterson's 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead,' is about as noir as cinema gets. Two outwardly successful but unfulfilled men make one desperate attempt to improve their lives, but it all goes horribly wrong and they end up making things even worse.
  
  The narrative structure builds tension creatively; kicking off with a very stressful armed jewelery store robbery that goes South, then cutting to each perpetrator days prior to unravel how it happened. Phillip Seymour Hoffman's character is a businessman who seems to have achieved the American Dream, but he's desperate for even more money to lift he and his wife (Marisa Tomei) from their life of secrecy and infidelity. Then there's Ethan Hawke's character who works for him but is also desperate for money because he's failing to live up to his financial aspirations, and has a daughter to support.
  
  Their scrappy act of criminality to break free from these unfulfilled lives brilliantly paints the American Dream as the hollow ideal that it is, and then the final act depressingly sees the repercussions of this destroy the lives they had previously built. With brilliant performances from Hoffman, Hawke and Tomei who all wear their discontent in different ways, and typically brilliant direction from Sidney Lumet, the result is a deeply depressing but highly engaging film full of tension, self-destructive character arcs, and a great exposure of American idealism.
  
  WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: It's about as hopeless as noir gets...
  
  VERDICT: 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead,' exposes the hollowness of the American Dream by showing the awful consequences of one scrappy act of desperation by two unfulfilled people.

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