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Confidence - 4/25/03 - R - 98m
Ed
Burns - Jake Vig
Rachel Weisz - Lily
Dustin Hoffman - The King
Director: James Foley
Written by: Doug Jung
JEF
Have you ever gotten directions to a place that read like, “Left,
Right, Left, Left, Right, Right, Left, Right, Left”? And then, when
you are ready to leave the place you just drove to, you actually have
to read the directions again and flip the turns in your head, until you
eventually get out to the main road?
Well, that’s kinda how I felt while watching this movie.
Storyline: Ed Burns plays the lead role of Jake Vig a
smooth talking con man. He has a group of guys (and a gal, later on) who
are in his “posse” who are all in on the con. They’ve
got this one scam down, to a T, where everyone plays a certain role in
the scam. Well, this one time, they scam the wrong guy. They scam a guy
who works for another big time con man. The big time con man is named
“King” played by Dustin Hoffman. Well, King finds out about
the scam, and guess what… he wants his money back. The rest of the
movie deals with Jake trying to get King’s money back, or face the
ugly consequences.
It’s hard to go into too much detail here, because the movie was
full of a bunch of characters, and each one played an important part in
the whole story, you really had to keep track of who was who, and who
worked for whom. I hate to say the movie was over my head, but I have
to admit, I had a hard time keeping up with this who-dunnit, The storyline
was complicated, and although I never actually felt lost during the movie,
I was struggling to try and figure out the end of the movie and how things
were accomplished, and who did what. It wasn’t so much that you
could not figure out what was coming next in the plot, but rather stringing
it all together. I won’t go so far as to say this is a bad point
to the movie. It’s nice to get a movie that gives the audience a
challenge, and doesn’t spoon-feed the plot to us with flashback
scenes, and explanations. I think for me, it was just the amount of characters
that I had to keep track of that gave my mind a work out.
Now, as to the plus side of this movie, I think the acting was well done
all around. Dustin Hoffman, who I’m not used to seeing play the
role of a villain, did a terrific job, playing this hyper active bad guy
(I hope to see him play more villians). I think I also have to give a
tip of the hat to the writer of this story for making his character such
a multi-faceted character, which Hoffman handled very well. Ed burns did
very well playing his part as the lead con. He had amazing “confidence”
in playing his role, and although found himself in some tough spots, did
not come across as a tough-guy, but a guy who preferred to use his mind
to get out of tough situations. The supporting cast was well done; Luis
Guzman and Donal Logue were a couple of cops on the take, Paul Giamatti
played the jumpy little con guy well (although I kept seeing his character
of the orangutan in the Planet of the Apes 
),
Rachel Weisz, played the role of Lily, a pick-pocket, who Jake recruited
into the “gang”. Although I think She did a good job playing
her part, I think her character was not nailed down; she jumped around
from a tough street broad, to a somewhat needy character. Keep your eye
on newcomer “Franky G.” who played the role of “Lupus”,
it was a smaller role in the movie, but he did very well. He’ll
be playing a part in the upcoming movie “The Italian Job”
(which will be on my must see list), and I predict this guy will be going
places.
A small thing that did start to bother me was some of the one-liner zingers.
Granted there were some good ones thrown in there, but there were too
many I think that took away the impact of the good ones.
So all in all not really a bad movie, and I’m glad I saw it in the
theatre, but because of it’s complexity, I just couldn’t give
it a solid green light. If your looking for a bit of a challenge in keeping
track of a multitude of characters, by all means go see this in the theatre,
otherwise I’d say wait for the DVD, and then give this one a rental.
Jef