I'm still not sure whether I liked Confidence or not.  It's one of those films that's perfectly entertaining while you're watching it but don't realize how slight it actually is until you think about it afterward. Movies about con men are generally enjoyable by definition, mostly because it's a rare example of a genre that hasn't been totally rubbed in the dirt, but in terms of storytelling, Confidence is on par with a typical episode of Boomtown.  At its very best, the film struggles to be as good as David Mamet at his very worst (i.e., Heist).  In fact, you can't watch Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross and even suggest Confidence belongs in the same league (ironically, however, both were directed by James Foley).

Confidence starts out promisingly, with Ed Burns (Life Or Something Like It) lying in a pool of his own blood (how's that not promising?) as his voiceover reflects, "So I'm dead, and I think it's because of this redhead."  Burns plays Jake Vig, the cocky leader of a traveling group of cons we later learn has been working the underbelly of Los Angeles for the last several months.  Through flashback, we see the previous three weeks, which starts with the faction unwittingly conning $150,000 from the accountant of a local mobster/sexual deviant called the King (Dustin Hoffman, Moonlight Mile).  The King is a man who can hold a grudge like you wouldn't believe, so instead of just hightailing it out of town, Jake decides to have a meet to straighten things out.

The two men agree Jake and his boys will work off the $150,000 by going after an untouchable mark - the legendarily impervious bank owner Morgan Price (Robert Forster, Diamond Men).  The rest of Confidence shows Jake & Co. trying to pull off the $5 million con, but you know there's going to be a lot of double and triple-crossing going on, as well.  If you've seen this kind of film before, it's pretty easy to figure out who's screwing who over.  In fact, the biggest surprise would have been if Jake had really died at the end.

Speaking of Jake, how, exactly, did Ed Burns become a leading man? Usually, he comes off as Ben Affleck trying to do Ed Norton, but here he's just a low-rent Danny Ocean (the Clooney version, not the Sinatra benchmark). Aside from Kirk Douglas, Burns might be the absolute worst person to narrate a film. Listening to him almost gave me a hernia.  His adorable little monologues into the camera got to be a little too much, as did the jerky editing and the camera placement in the two scenes involving outdoor cafés (where passing traffic and pedestrians nearly sent me into a seizure).

There are problems with Doug Jung's script, too.  The dialogue, not to mention the trunk scene, tries too hard to be like something penned by Quentin Tarantino.  When Jake is forced to take the King's right-hand man (Franky G.) on the bank score with him, you can't help but think about Danny DeVito making Gene Hackman do the same with Sam Rockwell in Heist.  And thank God they limited the cutesy visuals, like when Jake and his sidekicks look for their perfect mark at Price's bank (as much as I dig Forster, Price would have been better left as a maguffin).  The only untapped con cliché is that it isn't Jake's Last Big Score before he retires.

Still, Confidence is fun to watch, mostly because of its stellar B-list cast (two of Jake's henchmen – Donal Logue and Paul Giamatti – play Cleveland comic book hero Harvey Pekar in the upcoming American Splendor) and the colorful cinematography from Juan Ruiz Anchía, who has shot better grifting flicks (Mamet's House of Games and Glengarry Glen Ross).  I don't know about you, but I get off much more on watching low-stakes cons, where you see a guy work his ass off for 20 bucks.  This $5 million thing is just too much.  And it's one thing to root for one group of lowlifes ripping off cash from another lowlife.  But from a bank?  And people wonder why ATM fees are so high.

1:38 –

for language, violence and sexuality/nudity