Confidence: Critic Reviews

Confidence may be mannered at times, but its shell-game plot is alive with organic trickery.

If Confidence was made by people who have seen too many movies, it seems to be aimed at people who have seen too few.

On a level with Steven Soderbergh's blah remake of Ocean's Eleven.

Makes you smile while its fingers do the swiping.

Getting taken for a ride with someone at the controls -- these are the elements that keep us watching.

Confidence is really no more than a B-movie with a particularly ace cast. But that's part of the pleasure.

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.

As pulp entertainment, Confidence is great fun and Foley's first good movie since the very different Glengarry Glen Ross.

A sharp, witty thriller.

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.

Surely there is something wrong with a movie that is supposed to make you go Wow! yet instead provokes a great big Huh?

What a shame, that such a well-made movie is never able to convince us it is anything more than merely well-made.

Foley keeps the action moving swiftly enough that you don't have time to enter analytical mode.

While Foley's movie has style to burn, style does not a movie make.

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.

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.

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.

Overplotted, overcontrived, overshot and overedited.

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.

A stylish, compelling crime caper full of smoothly navigated plot twists.

Beware movies that open with lengthy voice-over narration. Particularly if they star the ever-more -annoying Ed Burns.

Hoffman rules the movie like the King rules the crime world, by what seems like some natural birthright.

A feature lesson in how not to make a caper movie.