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When you first see Rachel Griffiths come onto the
screen in The Hard Word, you immediately realize what’s
wrong with the movie. Griffiths plays Carol, the wife of professional
armed robber Dale (Pearce), and the problem can be
seen in the blonde wig she wears. It’s not that the wig looks
fake. It’s not even out of place in this heist movie/pseudo-Notorious
knockoff hybrid. What’s wrong exactly is that the wig perfectly
illustrates just how simple director Roberts seems
to think making a hard-boiled adventure is. In his mind, he
seems to have decided on a formula: Take three criminal brothers
who are really just decent, genial blokes trying to make a
living, add a platinum gangster’s moll whose loyalties are
reliably ambiguous, throw in a bit of the shady fence character
who doesn’t realize that he’s not the only one doing the double-crossing,
shake, bake, and serve.
The Hard Word is neither hard-boiled nor hard-at-work.
Made in Australia with an entirely Aussie cast, the film comes
across as a mish-mash of clichés from the American crime caper
and the folksy British social comedy. Think of a bloodier,
more painfully “clever” The Full Monty, and you have
the general idea. Roberts (who, as both director and screenwriter,
has to suffer the auteur’s burden of taking sole blame)
seems more concerned with constructing Mamet-clone
dialogue (The most excruciating example? One character asks
where some stolen money is stashed, only to be answered, “I
stuck it up a cow’s ass.” His reply? “Well I hope you washed
your hands afterward.”) than with structuring a plot that
the audience can actually care about.
The plot he does come up with doesn’t make a whole lot of
sense. And I don’t mean that it’s convoluted. We’re talking
common sense. The Twentyman brothers (Pearce, Edgerton,
and Richardson) are released from prison at the behest
of their crooked lawyer, Frank (Taylor) so that he
can get them to pull One Last Job. They find themselves back
behind bars soon, though, because of some “paperwork technicalities.”
Frank springs them out once again, under one condition? Can
you guess? Yep, One Last Job. Again. The catch this time,
though, is that Frank has also hired a pair of local criminals
to oversee the job. Complications arise, not the least of
which is the fact that Carol has been cheating on Dale with
Frank, for reasons which are murky until the end. The story
that follows is notable only for a scene featuring death-by-lava-lamp,
and the music, which often sounds like something you might
hear playing in a head shop run by Atom Egoyan. And
when the soundtrack and a single death scene are the only
things a film has going for it, that’s a problem.
Ultimately, The Hard Word is disposable, and not in
a fun, garbage-as-treat kind of way. It aspires to the level
of heist films like Ocean’s Eleven and The Sting.
But it winds up settling into late-night cable territory.
—Cole Sowell
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out of 5
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