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BY MAGGIE SCOTT

A man admits he hasn’t been a good father to his son. The child confesses he hasn’t been a good son. But, it’s too late. The die is cast. Years of emotional and moral neglect have left their mark on the Hanson men; and the devil is about to get his due.

The veteran director (Network; Serpico) Sidney Lumet proves he’s still one of the best there is in the craft with the bone chilling Think Film production of “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.”

With a structure as ingenious as a Rubik’s Cube, the story of brothers Hank (Ethan Hawke) and Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) shoots for tragedy on a Biblical level, but succeeds instead brilliantly on a pulp fiction level. Kelly Masterson’s propulsive screenplay opens with a man and woman coupling. It is graphic and revealing of more than naked flesh. Not love and caring, but dominance, discontent, insecurity simmer below the surface of this relationship. He says everything’s “wonderful.” She says for now she doesn’t think of herself as messed up. But, things are about to be messed up beyond all recognition.

A title appears on the screen: Day of Robbery. A woman opens a jewelry store and is confronted by a nervous masked man. Both are fatally shot in what appears is a botched, rank amateur heist. When the robber’s body comes crashing through the store’s front door, Hank floors the accelerator of the rented getaway car and peels out of the shopping center, screaming obscenities at his brother, Andy.

Why? Because he put Hank up to the “perfect” crime of robbing their parents’ business (“trust me”). Sixty thousand dollars apiece insurance payout could “solve everything for both of us,” is how Andy saw it. But, in tension-heightening chapters telling the story of the robbery from each characters perspective and in slightly different time frames, it becomes clear that everything is going to literally be blown to bits.

Already considered a “baby” by his father (Albert Finney) and a “loser” by his ex-wife and his daughter, Hank has now become accessory to murder of his own mother. “It came apart,” he wails to Andy. Also coming apart is Andy’s marriage and his job. Four days before the robbery he learned a company audit is about to discover he’s been ordering payroll for two terminated employees. That cash went to pad the six-figure income he needs to support a coke habit and he wants to support a wife (Marisa Tomei). The wife who is sleeping with his brother.

From how they got into this horrific fix, the story moves with inexorable, vise grip power to how and whether the brothers will get out. As the aggrieved father who turns out to be a ghastly wild card in the inevitable reckoning, Finney is superb; in an ensemble cast coaxed to proportionate greatness by a master. Oscars await.

Rated R for scene of graphic sex, nudity, strong violence, language, drug use.
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