With The Last Days Of American Crime, Megaton has parted with EuropaCorp and cleaned up his act—or at least his edits.

This vagueness might not matter if the story moved along without bogging itself down in less interesting details, like the backstory of Graham Bricke (Edgar Ramírez), a career criminal whose brother has recently died in prison.

Bricke is approached by Kevin Cash (Michael Pitt), the wayward son of another career criminal, who proposes a daring last-minute heist.

Cash’s girlfriend, Shelby Dupree (Anna Brewster), positioned as a Besson-style supermodel/assassin but who is actually an expert hacker, will block the API signal just after it goes online, creating a window just long enough for Bricke and Cash to make off with a billion dollars and change and head to sweet Canadian freedom.

For Cash, it’s a chance to step out of his father’s shadow; for Bricke, it’s supposed to count as revenge for his brother, a character who has roughly one minute of screen time before he’s dispatched to create a hollow rooting interest.

When guns aren’t firing and tires aren’t screeching, the screenplay is a stew of garbled dialogue (“If this gunshot doesn’t kill me, your driving is”), questionable metaphors (the government is apparently “playing Jesus with people’s brains”), and ham-fisted commentary (whoa, did that sleazy criminal just switch his career to banking?!).

In its final hour, The Last Days Of American Crime finally gets down to the business of its big heist, revealing both the propulsive entertainment value the filmmakers have been inexplicably stalling and the thinness of the whole enterprise.