Simon Pegg stars in this Coen brothers–inspired crime caperas Charlie Wolfe, a British hit man with a handlebar mustache, but the true star is Brazilian actress Alice Braga (City of God, I Am Legend).

The film’s hook: Braga’s Alice appears to die in each of the film’s three interlocking chapters. In the first, Perth dentist Nathan (Sullivan Stapleton) and his lovely wife and assistant, Lucy (Teresa Palmer of the blindingly bright blue eyes), kidnap Alice in order to pay off Nathan’s gambling debts.

In the second, Lucy encourages her bar owner brother, Jack (Callan Mulvey), to hire Charlie to bump off his wife, Alice, who is having an affair with Dylan (Luke, the littlest Hemsworth). The two strands come together in the third as debtors and debt collectors, including Bryan Brown 's dirty cop, collide.

Director Kriv Stenders’s film isn’t as clever as it thinks it is, but it’s technically proficient and sufficiently diverting (dodgy CGI pyrotechnics aside). Mostly, it’s a showcase for Braga who feels like the only character that could actually exist outside the confines of the puzzle-piece structure.

Pegg is fine, but someone like Edgar Wright could’ve given him lines with more sticking power. The primary lesson of this project: Do not fuck with the Braga women (Alice's aunt, Sonia Braga, played the title character in Kiss of the Spider Woman).