Very well executed

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

In the opening scene of "Confidence", Edward Burns is lying dead in a back alley. He narrates the story as he lies on the pavement. But is he William Holden dead as in "Sunset Boulevard" or is he some other kind of dead? "Confidence" is the perfect title for a heist movie that heists large chunks of plot from "The Sting" without so much as a nod to the original creators. The problem with borrowing so much from a classic film is that it isn't much of a surprise once the audience realises where they have seen it all before. Unfortunately "Confidence" is so confident that it actually telegraphs the ending at the beginning.Edward Burns plays Jake Vig, grifter and conman. He and his team of grifter buddies work a scam on a mark who turns out to be working for a far more serious criminal, Winston King, played with acting chops in overdrive by Dustin Hoffman.When one of the team is killed, Burns and the guys realise that King is out for revenge. Jake decides to head off further payback by approaching King and making him a deal. Jake offers to pull off an even bigger scam that will net millions of dollars for both of them. However revenge for the death of his friend is also on the agenda for Jake.He even asks Winston King to bankroll the deal. Chutzpah and confidence are not only Jake's stock in trade but also his philosophy. "You're good," King says to Jake, "I can't even tell when you're lying." But it's not actually true, you can tell; Burns doesn't have a great range as an actor and the demeanour he adopts here is not a particularly likable one.The scam involves stealing a large sum of money from a former gangster, Morgan Price played by Robert Forster. The plan is to take the money during an exchange of funds with a small, offshore bank. It also involves bringing one of Price's executives into the scam. To achieve this, Burns approaches a prostitute, Lily, to be part of the team, and to seduce the executive.Lily is played by Rachel Weisz who adopts a hard-boiled persona and looks disconcertingly like a drag queen. Whatever the costume designers had in mind, her whole look would make a good subject for a fashion makeover by Trinny and Susannah on "What Not To Wear".Although "Confidence" does possess a certain slickness, the 'f word' is used to the point where it could be a record for any film. Why the filmmakers would sanction such repetition is mystifying, unless it indicates improvisation from the actors – unimaginative improvisation at that. It's just another creative miscalculation among many others in the film.Slick, shallow and far too self-conscious, "Confidence" isn't totally bad. It has enough energy to divert while it plays; it is only when it has finished that its most obvious quality comes into play – it is instantly forgettable.

Seeing as this is a movie about con artists you have to know that things may not always be as they seem to be. It's safe to assume that somewhere along the way somebody's getting the rug pulled out from underneath him. Somebody's getting conned. Unfortunately in this instance the audience is getting somewhat conned as well. It's a movie of tricks, a movie which wants to impress you with how smart it is. But it's not nearly as smart as those involved in making it would like to believe. It's all too predictable and thus in the end not nearly as dramatic as would be hoped. As any good con artist movie would this one has all kinds of twists and turns to try and throw you off. But you can see where this is headed a mile away. The movie tries to fool you but it telegraphs its ultimate destination very early on. The big surprises are ultimately not surprising at all. And thus the movie fails.If the story ultimately lets you down you would hope that the movie at least works as a good bit of fun. But we are denied even that pleasure. It's rather dull, moments of true excitement are very few and far between. The whole movie suffers from a lack of personality which is best personified by the lead character of Jake Vig, played by Edward Burns. This is the character at the heart of the movie, it's his story, he even serves as the film's narrator. And the character just doesn't work. Burns obviously was going for cool, calm and collected in his portrayal of Jake. In that he succeeds but in doing so he has created a character that's rather boring. There's no spark to this guy, no reason why the audience should identify with or care about him. There's nothing memorable about him. On the other end of the spectrum there's Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of the crime lord known only as The King. This character is, to put it mildly, an eccentric fellow. A little too eccentric to take seriously. We're supposed to find him menacing but that's quite a stretch. It's another key character which just doesn't work. Which leaves very little left to potentially salvage the movie. Some of the supporting performances, notably those of Paul Giamatti and Rachel Weisz, work better but they are not nearly enough to prop this movie up. The key characters don't connect, there's very little in the way of fun or entertainment, and after jerking you around all the way through the story lands with a resounding thud. Pretty much a total misfire.

Add irritating to the summary. Con movies are great when they have unexpected twists and turns and the marks who are being conned are not so dopey that you roll your eyes with exasperation. While there are many twists and turns to this story, most of them you can spot a mile away and it's impossible to fathom how anyone with the least intelligence would fall for them. Writer Doug Jung uses the f-word throughout as though audiences could really give an eff. (Just get on with the story, buddy!) Most of the characterization is so over-written as to be irritating beyond belief. Dustin Hoffman as a sleazy crime-boss gives a performance that out-rivals Bette Davis in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane for sheer hokiness and high camp. A good cast wasted in a script that is so overwritten you want to take a pair of pruning shears and chop it down to a realistic and manageable level. While Doug Jung has indeed gone on to finer things this is a flailing mess of a script that needed a firm hand to shape it into an impressive whole. (Isn't Ed Burns known for his writing ability? One has to assume he wasn't allowed to tamper with this.) Confidence is a one-time watch that requires a LOT of patience. A shame because the idea and talent is there but the execution is lacking.

If this film had been released 20 years ago, it might be seen as a startling, revealing look at the world of con artists. But it didn't come out 20 years ago, before David Mamet's House of Games and Stephen Frears' The Grifters were released; it came out in 2003, after con artists have become almost passé. It has been made with a lot of competent talent, but that cannot make up for a lazy script.Role call: Dustin Hoffman, Ed Burns, Andy Garcia, Rachel Weisz, Paul Giamatti, Donal Logue, Luis Guzman, and even Tommy "Tiny" Lister, who played the President in The Fifth Element. Burns leads a team of con artists who inadvertently rip off one of Hoffman's friends. Since Hoffman plays a crime lord here (with ADHD!), he has one of the team members killed. Burns doesn't give the money back - instead, he offers to work another con for Hoffman to pay back what he took. Nice enough setup… Performances all around are satisfactory. There's one scene where Hoffman has forgotten to take his ADHD pills that is, I'm certain, the reason he took the role. Lots of groping of women and slapping of faces. The movie is directed with energy and style by James Foley (director of Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross) and has an interesting green and purple lighting scheme.Unfortunately, it all comes down to the storytelling, and flashy as the camera moves may be, the script doesn't cut the mustard. It's full of interesting characters, but fails to be full of interesting scenes. The story of the con is about as predictable as they get. Many twists and several turns lie within the plot, fulfilling the need of the genre, but those twists and turns never create any real drama. Some movies are about more than their stories. This movie is about ONLY its story. Every word spoken is spoken to advance the plot, not to see the characters in any sort of three dimensional way or to create something out of their situation that we average schmoes can relate to. An annoying flashback/flash forward structure exists only to capture an audience's attention in those first precious moments of a film. It has no real purpose in the grand scheme - the movie is not more entertaining because of it, so it should have been abandoned. This is a sufficient con/caper movie, by which I mean it wraps up its story in a mostly sensible way with the proper amount of (false) tension. But that to me hardly seems sufficient.http://www.movieswithmark.com