Go to your local Blockbuster, pick out a straight-to-video B-movie, and I’ll bet you it is a heist movie. It is quite hilarious actually. But hey, look here, a heist movie with Guy Pierce…The Hard Word. Not one to shy away from a movie simply because I haven’t heard of it, I grabbed it. There certainly was nothing else to grab, and who knows, it could be good.

Ahem. OK, maybe Guy Pierce owed a friend a favor back home in Australia. Maybe Guy Pierce was kidnapped by the director and blackmailed to do this film. Whatever happened, I find it hard to find fault with Mr. Pierce, for his performance is really the only thing this movie has going for it. This incoherent movie is about 3 brothers who get released out of jail to do a heist (at the same exact time no less!), set up by their lawyer. They are double crossed by their lawyer, who is also banging Dale’s (Guy Pierce) wife. Dale’s wife, played by a particularly man-ish Rachel Griffiths, is in on the set up. They are incarcerated again, and let out again, to do a heist set up by their lawyer. None of this matters, because none of it makes any sense. The story never gets off the ground, and instead drags and drags and goes nowhere. Various subplots involving the other two brothers and crooked cops are laughably irrelevant, and end as quickly and inconceivably as they began. There is virtually no viable explanation for any of the plot points in the movie, and you are never given adequate explanation for who does what and why. It would take up way too much room to pick apart all the various plot holes and inconsistencies, because they are simply everywhere.

There are some fun bits of sharp dialogue that elicit true laughter, but everything else in between is so mangled and pointless that it’s hard to care. This writer/director Scott Roberts really has no idea how to tell a good story with believable characters and motivations. He is trying to be Tarantino here, but he cannot hide the fact that anybody else could probably have done it better. Actually, seeing a movie like this really makes you appreciate good filmmaking, because a movie like this highlights how many things writer/directors can do wrong in a movie, and how talented they have to be to get it right. Stay away from this one.