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Jake Vig is a con artist. If you couldn't tell from his name, you can certainly tell from the first ten minutes of this film, in which Jake (Ed Burns) and his buddies (Paul Giamatti and Paul von Holt) dupe a suit out of a suitcase full of cash by constructing a bar room scenario in which it looks like things are going hellaciously wrong. A gun has gone off, a body lies on the floor, the cops are on the way, the bartender has a gun pointed at Jake, and Jake's pointing his piece right back at the bartender. It's a Mexican stand-off and the sirens are getting closer.

So what do we do? Do we leave? Do we fight? What's the score?

We do nothing. We stand, point our guns and play 'dicks at thirty paces' while the victim of the scam takes off, leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars and a supposedly dead accomplice behind.

It's a neat trick, although it forgets one very important thing - every hundred thousand dollar haul leaves a very angry owner of said hundred thousand dollars behind. And in this case, the owner of said booty is a guy known as The King. And The King holds a grudge.

Standard set-up? Yeah, and it's a standard pay-off from there. Any reviewer worth his salt will tell you that the Narrator and the Flashback are two of the cheapest filmmaking tools around. Sure, they allow a writer and a director to progress their story simply without worrying about long scenes and backstory, but that's kind of why such moves are considered 'cheap'. A talented filmmaker will set up a character or a scene with pictures and dialogue, not a ghostly voice running over the whole scene, connecting the dots for you. And the flashback... Come on, is there really anything worse than starting a film with the end of that same film?

These tactics are just too easy, allowing a hack filmmaker to get away with shallow characterization and shallow situations with a little filmic flimflam that most in the audience won't consciously detect. And in Confidence, director James Foley and screenwriter Jung have bet the farm on both.

And that's why the film, though entertaining in parts and certainly ambitious at times, fails on most counts. 'Kooky' Burns is not the kind of actor that can pull of any role, and the charismatic thief is a role that might be best left in his 'do not attempt' column in future. Sure, he's good looking, and he can deliver his lines without too much strain, but next to accomplished actors like Paul Giamatti, he's all at sea. Giamatti, who has just kicked on and on from Safe Men to Man on the Moon to Storytelling to the recent American Splendor (despite a few sell-out roles in between) is the heart and soul of this piece. He's a constant reminder of what it could have been. He shows humanity and heart and realism, while Burns seems to be trying out for The Thomas Crown Affair 2.

Rachel Weisz too shines, as Jake's love interest, as she offers up a few moments of 'real' in what amounts to an overly shiny production. In a story of conmen who do it almost entirely for the love, surely the main characters should be a rough and tumble bunch who wouldn't look out of place in a surly bar, but director Foley has these guys so polished and Armani'ized that you'd have to think he was more worried about sex appeal than storyline.

And that's where Dustin Hoffman, as the King, comes in. Hoffman is an actor, pure and simple, but even Hoffman's presence can't turn this writing into gold. Writer Jung has a background in TV, and it shows as each situation is quickly and simply solved, and real danger seems to never be a bother to anyone.

If Confidence were a TV drama, it might pass muster. But it cost a whole lot more to make than a TV drama would, so you'd exepct a little more attention to the formula of good filmmaking than what's on display here. By no means awful, and even at times fun, the whole is a lot less than the sum of its parts.

link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=6808&reviewer=1
originally posted: 01/05/04 14:08:26
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