American Heist

James has put his criminal past behind him and is trying to build an ordinary life: a job as a mechanic, a relationship with his girlfriend Emily, and hopes of starting his own business. That effort stalls when his older brother Frankie is released after ten years in prison. Frankie was the one who drew James into crime years earlier, and James served time for it, so the reunion is tense rather than warm.

Frankie proposes one more job, a bank robbery in New Orleans meant to settle their debts and let them start over. James agrees, and the scheme puts him alongside the gangster Sugar and his crew. What was presented as a small, final score goes wrong, and Emily is drawn into the danger. The film is a remake of a 1959 heist picture and was directed by Sarik Andreasyan, his first English-language feature, from a screenplay by Raul Sanchez Inglis. Hayden Christensen plays James and Adrien Brody plays Frankie, with Jordana Brewster as Emily and the rapper Akon as Sugar.

Made for about 10 million dollars, it earned modest audience scores: on IMDb it sits at 5 out of 10 from roughly 18,000 votes, and on TMDB at 4.8 from under 400. A critics' rating of 3.6 out of 10 from 16 reviews places it below even those viewer scores, so neither group received it warmly. Andreasyan went on to direct Mafia: Survival Game and The Earthquake, both in 2016.