The hard word for The Hard Word, Australian director Scott Roberts’s heist film, is "feeble." A trio of incarcerated thieves, brothers though without a trace of family resemblance, practice their trade from behind bars with the assistance of their lawyer, Frank (Robert Taylor), and two prison officials, all of whom get a piece of the action. The arrangement has some snags: Frank is boffing Carol (Rachel Griffiths), the wife of eldest brother Dale (Guy Pearce), who’s the leader of the gang. Plus, their respectable accomplices are a little slow in working out the details of the parole they’ve been promised, insisting that after one last big job at a Melbourne racetrack everything will be squared away. A larky reprise of The Getaway that never recovers from the miscasting of Griffiths as a femme fatale or from its grimy visuals, The Hard Word earns some points for the remaining pair of brothers: Mal (Damien Richardson), a good-natured butcher who falls in love with the driver of a hijacked car, and Shane (Joel Edgerton), a polymorphously perverse knucklehead with a knack for seducing therapists. It gives them back, however, in its gratuitously bloody and banal climactic robbery. (103 minutes)