amesmonde A seasoned con-artist's most recent trick goes wrong when his team steal money from the mob, they then go about arranging another hustle to get the money back.Director James Foley's Confidence pretty much set the formula for the UK TV series Hustle (2004) that appeared a year later and the more recent Leverage (2008). It's flashy and slick and with stylised lighting, camera work and editing.Rachel Weisz is debatably miscast, nevertheless Edward Burns is excellent in the lead role and rest of the cast are adequate. Both Andy Garcia and Dustin Hoffman are underused but what is there is, is first class. The flashbacks and narration from Burns guides you though the film, written by Doug Jung, the script is witty although there's a little too much exposition and the tone feels inconsistent at times.If you've already seen the aforementioned TV series the twist will come as no surprise but if you want to see the seed of these shows and what a gritty film version would be like - look no further.

hall895 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.

Neil Doyle EDWARD BURNS is a talented actor but here he's almost expressionless in a screenplay that, according to the trivia section of IMDb, uses the "f" word 130 times. Take the word out, and you've got a film that would have been a lot shorter and perhaps would have been less distracting in its obvious attempt to make the dialog sound tough.Overkill of the word is true of most of the script. It begins with a burst of energy in a scene where nobody is sure what's happening and continues in that vein for the rest of the fast-paced story. Characters come and go and none of them stick in the mind with more than surface effect.RACHEL WEISZ, DUSTIN Hoffman and ANDY GARCIA are all underused in sketchy roles and the big payoff reminds us how much more successful "The Sting" was in pulling off its own twist upon twist.Mediocre film-making in every respect, losing steam before it even reaches the halfway mark. Not worth a peek.

Mark Heiliger 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