Confidence Reviews
Top Critic
Overplotted, overcontrived, overshot and overedited.
This is a one sweet sexy sting of a movie.
| Original Score: 3/4
What it shares with most of its predecessors is a sterling cast, in this instance almost entirely male, and the willingness of several talented performers to play against type, with entertainingly comic effect.
... Confidence does suffer a bit from some plot devices that haven't been original since The Sting, but it's a top-notch character study and a fun exercise in style.
Surely there is something wrong with a movie that is supposed to make you go Wow! yet instead provokes a great big Huh?
On a level with Steven Soderbergh's blah remake of Ocean's Eleven.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
There's enough hard-boiled style here to nudge this movie into the worth-seeing category.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
This is strictly a by-the -numbers affair, camouflaged ever so slightly by some nifty rapid-fire dialogue and the requisite double crosses and plot twists.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Hoffman rules the movie like the King rules the crime world, by what seems like some natural birthright.
| Original Score: 4/5
How much you're willing to give Foley and company a pass for this depends on how much you dig this genre's familiar elements.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Unlike the best cons, we can always see the con artists at work. But at least it's fun to welcome James Foley back to the game.
As pulp entertainment, Confidence is great fun and Foley's first good movie since the very different Glengarry Glen Ross.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Unlike with Mamet, there's no real payoff, not in insights, psychology or language -- just a clutch of anxious-to -charm movie stars, a puzzle-box plot, and an ending that encourages us to applaud venality.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Confidence isn't great and it's not trying to be. It just wants to take your money and show you a good time. It's an enjoyable way to be taken.
| Original Score: B
Confidence is really no more than a B-movie with a particularly ace cast. But that's part of the pleasure.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Dustin Hoffman should play villains more often.
| Original Score: B
What a shame, that such a well-made movie is never able to convince us it is anything more than merely well-made.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Makes you smile while its fingers do the swiping.
Beware movies that open with lengthy voice-over narration. Particularly if they star the ever-more -annoying Ed Burns.
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Getting taken for a ride with someone at the controls -- these are the elements that keep us watching.
A movie about a long con that, like its leading man, has no wit or style to speak of.
While Foley's movie has style to burn, style does not a movie make.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
If Confidence was made by people who have seen too many movies, it seems to be aimed at people who have seen too few.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
A breath of stale air that likes to pretend hard guys always have a witty answer to every question and fatal bullets to the head leave tiny bloodless holes.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
For those who enjoy movies about heists, cons, and double-crosses, this will satisfy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The con game movie sometimes seems smitten with its own coolness, and the big scam doesn't offer much surprise. But watching the pieces fall into place is fun, and the cast has a great time.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
A smart and sassy dark comedy that will keep you laughing and guessing until the very end.
At its best, Confidence is a weak remake of The Sting, without the charisma of Paul Newman and Robert Redford. At its worst, the movie wastes a talented cast.
| Original Score: 2/5
An empty house of style, written in dim Mamet Lite.
| Original Score: 2/4
You know you're being manipulated, set up for the big switcheroo, but the players are so juicy and the plot blips along with such momentum that you can only hang on and enjoy the ride.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Foley keeps the action moving swiftly enough that you don't have time to enter analytical mode.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Confidence may be mannered at times, but its shell-game plot is alive with organic trickery.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Lazily assembles a batch of movie stars, turns them loose on a script that reflects nothing so much as a committee interpretation of every other caper flick, and lets them bounce off each other like so many overpaid billiard balls.
A stylish, compelling crime caper full of smoothly navigated plot twists.
Doug Jung supplies a slick and clever screenplay that maps out all the moves like a chess master teaching a class, while veteran director James Foley casts the movie oh so sweetly.
