'Confidence' con games are a devious frolic

Friday, April 25, 2003

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Engineering the perfect con movie is a tricky shell game. It juggles two cons going on at once: the elaborate fraud perpetrated on the mark in the movie, and the trickier sleight of hand pulled on the audience, which remains a few steps ahead of the mark and a few clues behind the plot. The mark merely has to be fooled, but the audience has to be fooled and like it.

MOVIE REVIEW

CONFIDENCE

DIRECTOR: James Foley

CAST: Edward Burns, Rachel Weisz,

Andy Garcia, Dustin Hoffman

RUNNING TIME: 98 minutes

RATING: R for language, violence and sexuality/nudity

WHERE: Alderwood 7, Cinema 17,

Everett 9, Factoria, Galleria 11, Issaquah 9, Longston Place 14, Marysville Cinema 14, Metro, Oak Tree, Pacific Place, Parkway Plaza 12, Redmond Town Center, Renton Village, Woodinville 12

GRADE: B-

In the wake of the modern wiseguys and urban lowlifes that took over the crime cinema of the 1990s, the old-fashioned con movie has gotten wild cards stuffed into the stacked deck of its plots. Chaos theory rules where order once prevailed, and the result is spontaneous combustion.

"Confidence" opens in the latter mode -- would-be smoothy Jake (Edward Burns) confessing his sins with a gun to his head -- but the flashbacks take us to an update of "The Sting" with a fashionably cynical sheen.

Jake and pals swindled the wrong guy. To square themselves they agree to helm an elaborate confidence game for a sleazy minor boss with a major ego named King (Dustin Hoffman). In addition to a new partner, a seductive pickpocket (Rachel Weisz) with her own agenda, a pair of extorting cops and an obsessive federal agent (Andy Garcia, playing it borderline insane) buzz around their rickety scam.

The usually glib Burns, whose nasal voice has a whine that can sour sweet dialogue, is well cast here. As the King confesses to Jake with some admiration, "You can't tell when you're lying."

Unfortunately, it leaves little to care about. The only thing that these small timers have over the corrupt cops, crooked businessmen and ambitious gangsters is a code of loyalty, and even that is questionable.

Screenwriter Doug Jung's devious little plot swims in entertaining distractions -- jinxes, double-crosses, betrayals -- and turns on the almost precognitive ability of Jake to predict the minutiae of human behavior, while the momentum and misdirection of James Foley's direction enables the disbelief. If you don't look too closely and pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, the film delivers a clever confidence game, if not much else.