Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
My knowledge, memory and expectations of Confidence heading into this episode were best characterised by the numeral zero, although a quick glance at IMDB and seeing James Foley directing, he of Glengarry Glen Ross fame certainly raised some hope, balanced only by Doug Jung’s shared writing credit on The Cloverfield Paradox. Which way’s this going to fall?
Edward Burns’ Jake Vig and his gang of ne’er-do-wells have just finished conning some mark out of a stack of cash, which will soon have lasting consequences when they find out that mark was working for a local crime lord, Dustin Hoffman’s Winston “The” King. Jake is encouraged to proactively make amends after one of his gang is found killed, and meets with King to come to an arrangement. They plan to con a large sum of money from one of King’s rivals, Robert Forster’s Morgan Price, who happens to own a bank.
King agrees, but insists that his goon, Franky G’s Lupus string along with his usual gang of Paul Giamatti’s Gordo and Brian Van Holt’s Miles, also recruiting Rachel Weisz’ Lily to help with a plan to befriend and bamboozle bank VP Leon Ashby, played by the dependable John Carroll Lynch. Getting in the way of things are the gang’s semi tame bribed cops played by Luis Guzmán and Donal Logue, who are being blackmailed into, well, doing their jobs by Andy García’s Special Agent Gunther Butan, who’s been on the trail of Vig for many years and sees this as a prime opportunity to take him down.
And, I suppose that’s all the set up you need, and by this point in the episode I don’t think you’ll be too surprised to find out that things are not what they seem and perhaps you can’t trust anyone involved in any aspect of this film. Or most of today’s films for that matter, but this one in particular has a highly unreliable narrator, which is perhaps the closest this film came to displeasing me.
The rest of it is glossy and slick enough that any emotion refuses to adhere to it, be that positive or negative. It’s pacy enough that it’s never boring, and it’s a very easy, fairly enjoyable watch, but it’s not a film that’s going to make any kind of impact, apart from one day in the future wondering why it doesn’t show up on Ben Affleck’s IMDB page, before remembering that it did in fact instead star the discount, Poundland Ben Affleck, Edward Burns.
If I was in a worse mood I would perhaps be meaner about a film that gathers this amount of talent together without giving any of them anything particularly remarkable to do, but I suppose that also means no-one’s particularly bad. I can’t think of a lot else to say about Confidence other than to reiterate that it’s an very enjoyable watch that I’ve already largely forgotten, so it’s a good piece of disposable entertainment which makes it easy to recommend that you rent rather than buy.