But that's mostly due to the fact that the main focus was on two brothers.
Adrien Brody plays the older brother who did hard time for the crime that also involved his little bro played by Hayden Christensen who did a shorter sentence and got out determined to do as good of a job as any ex- con to keep his nose clean, but when his brother gets out, he forces little bro back into the life as a favor to the man that stop the constant booty tapping that he was getting.
This focus could have been better. Adrien Brody gave a decent performance as a man who got broken in his decade in prison, but this performance goes over weakly in this mediocre film that did not develop his character enough for Brody's attempts at heart breaking scene stealing.
Bouncing his acting chops off of Christensen was not a good call either. He tries, but Christensen seem too focus on his though guy persona to really get any acting done.
I feel most sorry for Johanna Brewster who is now officially typed cast as the girlfriend to the criminal car nut, which she perfected in the Fast and Furious franchise.
For the movie to be called American Heist is misleading, though the implementation of the heist was somewhat suspenseful, we did not get to see much heist planning. It's no Heat or Set it off.
Whatever this movie was trying to do it kind of fumbled the ball in both cases.