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CONFIDENCE
3/10
USA 2003 : James FOLEY : 98 mins
There are many reasons to dislike this self-satisfied, pointlessly twisty, very
minor would-be thriller, but one stands clear above them all – the black
hole of anti-charisma that is its leading man. Though studios persist
in trying to convince us otherwise, ‘star’ has never been the word for
Edward Burns, a performer so clearly infatuated with himself that he leaves
no room for the audience, let alone other characters and actors. Only
once has his charmlessness been sensibly deployed: Saving Private Ryan,
when Spielberg turned Burns’ grating persona (and scratchy voice) to the
film’s advantage.
Elsewhere, the results are invariably grim – especially when Burns himself (who
also suffers absurd delusions that he can write and direct) takes charge,
as in the emetic Sidewalks
of New York. In Confidence, viewers would be forgiven
for wondering if Burns had insisted on some kind of cheval mirror being
placed out of shot on set so that he could check his gorgeousness at every
opportunity, so brazen is his on-screen narcissism.
Defenders of the film may suggest that this trait belongs more to Burns’ character
than to Burns himself. But as con-man Jake Vig, Burns goes way beyond
cockiness into the realms of the insufferable. This is a major problem,
since he’s seldom off-screen, and also acts as the narrator of the film’s
cliched, episodic flashback structure. Lying in a pool of blood (“So I’m
dead…”) on a seedy New York street, Vig (even the name smacks of lazy
scriptwriter contrivance) recounts the events that got him there, to a
skeptical, gun-toting hood (Morris Chestnut).
What unfolds is a choppily-edited (by Stuart Levy), slickly-lensed (by Juan
Ruiz-Anchia), tedious yarn in which Vig, having landed himself in trouble
with the local gangland supremo known as The King (Dustin Hoffman, coasting
on nervy tics), offers to pull off a major scam. The target is shady financier
Morgan Price (Robert Forster), and Vig augments his usual team (Paul Giamatti,
Brian Van Holt) with the addition of a femme fatale pickpocket (Rachel
Weisz). Meanwhile scruffy fed Gunther Butan (Andy Garcia) observes from
the sidelines, eager to bring career-criminal Vig to justice…
Longtime hack-director
Foley takes a largely pedestrian approach to material of which, one suspects,
he isn’t entirely sure himself. He seems to think he’s making some kind
of “actors’ showcase”, and while Hoffman and Garcia are reasonably entertaining
to watch, Forster and Giamatti are distractingly underused – having such
fancy names in the supporting cast counts for little when Burns is allotted
so much more screen time. In fact, the biggest impact is made by the virtually
unknown Van Holt, who shows glimmers of genuine movie-star potential in
his relatively thankless role as Vig’s taciturn partner-in-crime.
Despite touches of pretension – such as naming the bar Vig owns after Euclid,
the father of classical geometry - Doug Jung’s script is strictly by-the-numbers
for this kind of fare: as in so many films these days, nothing and
nobody are what they seem! There’s one decent minor sting in a jewellery
shop, but the main Morgan Price plotline soon becomes almost impossible
to follow – in a decidedly non Euclidian manner - as cross follows
double-cross ad nauseam. And with Burns involved, there’s no shortage
of nauseam before the credits roll.
29th July, 2003
(seen 8th June: Showcase, Dudley)
by Neil
Young
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