Confidence

[JunkerSeed]

If you've ever seen "The Heist" (Gene hackman and Danny Devito), you know what to expect here. Very fun movie with cool characters conning the hell out of each other, double crosses, triple crosses and soforth. The idea is that A group of guys make a living out of conning people out of money. One day they con somebody who works for a big mob boss called King (Dustin Hoffman). King gets pissed at this, so the 4 guys have to make it up to him. They need to pull a con to get money for him, and they enlist the help of a HOT pickpocket along the way (Rachel Weisz).

 

To start off with, this movie has one hell of a cast. Everybody in the core group of cons is great, Edward Burns is a good protagonist, level-headed, cool, ummm, yeah, I guess he's fuckin "confident" aint he? Anyways, Luiz Guzman does a cool job as one of two cops that help the con men out. Andy Garcia makes a great appearance as federal agent. Very different, cool role for him. Dustin Hoffman actually plays a beleivable badass mob boss. This one is VERY different for him, I'm not used to seeing him headbutt people, but I loved him in this. So, the cast makes this movie lots and lots of fun as it plays out the twisty turny plot. This is important, cause if we didn't like these characters (and they're complete assholes, but we still like em) we wouldn't care about the plot's twists and turns.

 

The writing starts off pretty straight forward, most of the enjoyment coming from the dialogue and how these guys pull off such smart, cool con jobs. It ends up a sort of mind fuck, changing what you thought about several characters several times and all of this. It's sort of convoluted, but not that hard to follow what's happening, the plot twists enough to be fun, but it doesn't get annoying.

 

So, for a shot in the dark at the theater, this movie was great. You'll be hard pressed to find a more entertaining 2 hours in a theater. Again, if you've seen "the Heist" it's a lot like that. Probably because the director seems to be a David Mamet fan (he directed the movie version of "Glengarry Glen Ross"), this movie certainly takes plenty of influence from mamet. Cool stuff, it was a smart, fun movie and a good way to spend 2 hours and 6 bucks.