Braquage américain

This is an average movie. The story isn't that great, the actors aren't really that good, and even the title of the movie is not well chosen. The first hour is just about the difficult relationship between two brothers, with a lot of crying and moaning. Add in that plot a woman and a couple of wannabe gangsters and you get the story. I wasn't that impressed by their acting plus the storyline is kind of boring and sometimes even so far fetched it's getting annoying. And then after one hour of sitting through all of this you finally get the "Heist". No big deal at all, just a bunch of amateurs going in a bank and hope they don't get caught. A lot more crying and bad scenarios and you are finally done with this movie. Don't waste your time with this one.

But that's mostly due to the fact that the main focus was on two brothers.

Adrien Brody plays the older brother who did hard time for the crime that also involved his little bro played by Hayden Christensen who did a shorter sentence and got out determined to do as good of a job as any ex- con to keep his nose clean, but when his brother gets out, he forces little bro back into the life as a favor to the man that stop the constant booty tapping that he was getting.

This focus could have been better. Adrien Brody gave a decent performance as a man who got broken in his decade in prison, but this performance goes over weakly in this mediocre film that did not develop his character enough for Brody's attempts at heart breaking scene stealing.

Bouncing his acting chops off of Christensen was not a good call either. He tries, but Christensen seem too focus on his though guy persona to really get any acting done.

I feel most sorry for Johanna Brewster who is now officially typed cast as the girlfriend to the criminal car nut, which she perfected in the Fast and Furious franchise.

For the movie to be called American Heist is misleading, though the implementation of the heist was somewhat suspenseful, we did not get to see much heist planning. It's no Heat or Set it off.

Whatever this movie was trying to do it kind of fumbled the ball in both cases.

Boring, predictable and utterly forgettable, "American Heist" is a complete waste of time. I watched this because my wife has a thing for Adrien Brody. I think he's a fine actor, but clearly this was done just for a paycheck. It's hard to make a bland bank robbery, but it was done successfully here. Just putting known actors in a film does not a good film make, an intelligent well-written script helps and this was just thrown together without much thought.

Save your money and read a good novel or take a walk or stare into space! There are so many poor films out there. When the industry complains about loss of its audience, it should consider the product we are asked to rent/purchase.

At least I had Star Wars ... or The Pianist. Depending which actor might have thoughts about his career, the answers are there. Hayden hit the Jackpot (I hope for him) with the Star Wars franchise and Adrien Brody had his critical success with Polanski. The latter seems to be doing a neat movie from time to time, though he also seems to be doing some very bad ones too.

This isn't a really bad one, though you wonder about the characters and how Mr. Brody came to play a character like this. I guess it had to do with the family business in the script and a scene where he can "shine" if you want to call it that. It's really rather annoying not to mention predictable.

I decided to rent this movie in part due to the cast, but also for the fact that it seemed to promise that there would be a lot of action. But to tell the truth, I was really let down by the end results. If you are looking for a lot of action, you would probably be better off looking elsewhere. The opening hour of the movie has almost no action at all. What that first hour is instead devoted to is for the most part clichés you've seen in other heist movies before, recruiting people, planning, and other things presented without any fresh angles or viewpoints. And it's awfully slow; I kept wanting the movie to stop spinning its wheels and get to business. But after that first hour, the planned heist is pulled off and takes the remaining half hour of the running time. Is is worth the wait? I would say no. Except for one brief but somewhat cool moment involving a helicopter, the action and so-called tension and suspense feels generic and not the least bit exciting. And the movie ends on a note that feels both incomplete and has you wondering, "Just what was the point of this movie?" I will admit the movie looks okay for what wasn't a megabudget, but I've seen plenty of movies made for even less money that managed to be more exciting, more thought-provoking, and more action-packed than this.