I should really be a lot more sceptical about anything with
Bill Condon’s name attached to it. And not just because he’s the director
responsible for the Beauty & The Beast remake, either. Looking through the
man’s entire body of work, it is remarkably all over the damn place. Working on
the scripts for Chicago and The Greatest Showman, directing both halves of the
finale to the Twilight Saga, and then there’s his work a few years ago with Mr.Holmes; there’s a lot of range in that sample, and it’s getting to the point
where I genuinely don’t know whether anything he’s touched will be good or bad.
Still, teaming back up with the writer and lead actor of Mr. Holmes gives this
film some hope, so fingers crossed.
Ian McKellen has shown plentiful working chemistry with
Condon, and that thankfully holds true here. His performance as con artist Roy
is oozing with smoothness and he delivers every line of deception with just the
right charm where, even though the audience stays privy to his intentions from
the start, he hits a good middle line between knowing he’s full of shit and
hoping that he isn’t. And opposite him, Helen Mirren gets a pretty juicy role
as well as his latest mark Betty. Their chemistry together is quite good, and
when Russell Tovey’s perpetually suspicious journalist Steven is brought into
the equation, the simmering disdain can get quite enticing.
With how this film is written, even with the differing
source material, it definitely feels like something born from the same pen that
scripted Mr. Holmes. Much like how that film examined the titular character
from as many different angles as possible, this film does the same thing with
the concept of lying. Through the depiction of Roy’s rackets, between the
scenes with Betty and one of his side hustles involving Russian bankers, we get
quite a few different types of deception: Omission, appealing to the target’s
sympathies, wrapping a singular lie in enough actual fact that they become
indistinguishable, even Inglorious Basterds and its version of Hitler’s death.
Jeffrey Hatcher sure knows his intertextuality, as that last one ends up being
quite prescient for what comes next.
This all provides a solid bedrock for the film’s brand of
crime thrills… except ‘thrills’ aren’t exactly what come to mind when thinking
of this film. The way that Roy’s cons are shown, the engagement comes largely
out of the performances and the details floating around the frame, rather than
what’s in the frame. It at least builds up to a quite satisfying finale, which
admittedly is a bit obvious in revelation if not entirely in its specifics, but
that amounts to a film that’s worth watching mainly for its conclusion.
What that amounts to is a film that is pretty good overall,
aided greatly by the acting and Hatcher’s nimble scripting, but the bulk of its
power comes with the ending, not so much with what leads up to it. This is
basically designed for home video rental, and on that basis, I’d still say it’s
worth checking out.
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