Men in Black III

Sunday was International Moon Day (yes, that's a "thing") commemorating the date that human beings first put boot-treads on the Moon. That historic mission figured fictionally in this movie.

Written at the time of the film's release. 

Time Wounds All Heels
or
"Don't Ask Questions You Don't Want to Know the Answer To..."

The third "Men in Black" film had to go somewhere else but up. The first two films were variations on the "illegal alien" theme about a government organization that monitored the activities of extraterrestrials in the world and specifically New York City, and revolved around alien invasions and the containment of said aliens. And when you've seen one alien invasion directed by Barry Sonenfeld, you've seen them all, and hyper-kinetically at that. And once it's been established that "aliens can be anywhere" the joke runs a bit dry pretty quickly, especially when the sub-species can contain pug-dogs and large cockroaches. The second film tried to expand on those concepts and felt a bit thin in the process, concentrating a bit too much on the secondary characters rather than the basic plot and the character interactions.

So, where does Men in Black III go from there?

One of the nice aspects of the series has been its ability to still think outside the box, while expanding the horizons of just what that box might contain, be it variations of scale and dimension, even if only in afterthought. With the infinite reaches of space seemingly exhausted, the group (based, supposedly on an idea by Will Smith) has the series going back in time. Naturally. It ostensibly revolves around an Earth-takeover plot by another alien (one must ask at some point "why always us?"), "Boris the Animal" (who seems based on the DC Comics "Hell's Angel in Space" Lobo and is played with growly gutteral responses by Jemaine Clement from "Flight of the Conchords") who escapes from his maximum (and we mean maximum) security prison to find the man who sent him there 40 years ago—Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones). When he's unable to kill him here, the Boglodite finds another means to do so, and Agent J (Smith) wakes up the next morning, the only one with any memories of K past July, 1969. Agent K has been killed by Boris in the past, and J must journey back to try and save him.*

Once back there, J negotiates his way through a 1960's era way of doing things. Everything's a little less high-tech (a little less), but the MIB Agency is still there, as is the much younger Agent K (Josh Brolin, doing a bang-on interpretation of Jones) and J must solve the puzzle of saving the Earth (of course), while keeping K safe. The past sequences are great—Men in Black has exploited the "fish-out-of-water" angle perpetually—and new corners are being thrown out the whole time (My favorite being a brief glimpse of a "Barbarella"-type being escorted around MIB, and although Smith is a bit too "Red Bull" throughout the entire movie, check out his understated reaction to some Black Panthers). 

Great cast, too. Rip Torn is gone, but David Rasche plays him in the past, Emma Thompson is on hand as the new MIB head, Will Arnett makes a brief appearance as does Bill Hader. Toss in the chameleon-like Michael Stuhlbarg as an alien able to read multiple time-lines and there's always someone to deflect the eye, or hand things off from Smith.

But, the best thing about this "Men-in-Black" installment is resonance. The other two were fine, the first better than the second just for its novelty, but had a shelf-life of three minutes. Part of it is Sonenfeld's way of comically undercutting any meaning to the thing, by changing perspective—"you think you got a handle on it yet? Well, let me throw THIS at you!" The whole "the Universe is so big and cosmic that there's no way you can understand it because there's so many mysteries, so nothing is real" concept, which is the backbone of the series (and the source for most of its humor) leaves one with a feeling of "meh"—nothing matters in a vast uncaring, unfathomable Universe. 

Not here. The cold of Space has nothing to do with the leavening of Time, and, in this case, the franchise plays it straight, without a wink, a nod, a reveal, or a goo-spraying splat. For once, something really means something in the "Men in Black" Universe, and that venturing into uncharted territory makes the third time the charm.

  * I'm not saying anything here that isn't revealed in the trailer.

Aladdin (2019)

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Arabia
or
A Whole Re-Cycled World

Disney's live-action remake of Aladdin is a tough sell. Oh, don't misunderstand; it's a good movie—one might even say it's the best of Disney's kamikaze efforts to flesh out their revered animated classics—the art they established and are best known for—maybe in their fiscal attempt to find a tent-pole franchise (as if the parent company doesn't have enough of those) to crank out every couple of years, rather than roll the digital dice and counting on their new film to be as hot as Frozen.*

It's just that the 1992 animation version was so highly regarded—after they'd made their company best, Beauty and the Beast—as it was the last of the Menken-Ashman collaborations (the duo that revived the Disney animation brand in the 1980's under the Jeffrey Katzenberg regime) and it had the audacity to cast Robin Williams and the brio to match his improvisational pace with cell-drawings (principally by the gifted Eric Goldberg), and pulled it off with a manic energy that was simply breath-taking. It showed Disney wasn't the stodgy old cartoon company—they still took chances and aimed for the stars, not the fences.

Now, they're just happy to make return-trips. That's okay, if you want to start the development and generating cash, but it doesn't have the risk of charting new territory or any kind of innovation. Or risk.

Grumble aside, this cartoon-made-flesh does as good a job creating a similarly pleasing experience as its ink variety, and generating a similar amount of controversy as the original faced when it opened. Toss the bitching—they're tempests in an oil lamp; the studio has kept out Howard Ashman's original controversial lyrics and bent over backwards to have the "proper" ethnic casting (although the actress playing Princess Jasmine, Naomi Scott, is half-Indian if you want to make your picket sign accurate—she's great in the part, by the way, "despite" that fact) and beefed up the Princess' character and back-story, so the character is even more plucky than she was and less of a character for males to rescue.

Aladdin (played by Mena Massoud) is a parentless "street-rat", surviving on the streets of Agrabah near the Jordan River, by stealing anything he can get his thieving hands on. But, he's not such a bad sort, as he'll lift some food from the market and split it with his monkey Abu (voiced by Frank Welker again), then split it again with street urchins (1992 version) or a family (2019 version). There's a nice compression of the first film as Aladdin has an introductory song ("One Jump Ahead"), then meets Agrabah's Princess Jasmine (Scott), who is wandering the city-streets mingling with the people. Aladdin is immediately smitten and the princess introduces herself to him as "Dalia," the princess' handmaiden, to avoid detection. That song now serves as the song accompanying Aladdin and the princess running from the Royal Guard when she takes some bread to give to hungry kids. 

Aladdin takes "Daliah" to his make-shift home, where they start to get to know each other—other than the fact she's actually the princess—when she makes her excuses to leave because she sees over at the palace that there is a large cortege arriving, bearing another suitor for her. Her father, the Sultan (Navid Negahban) wants to marry her off, but, by decree, only royalty will be considered for the job. So, she begs off to meet the latest creep to try and woo her...leaving Aladdin with half-steeped tea and, to his shock, the princess' bracelet—given to her by her mother—which has been stolen by Abu. Bad monkey. No banana.

Meanwhile, back at the palace, the Royal Vizier, Jafar (Marwan Kenzari) has other plots-threads to plot. In an attempt to gain more power (he hates being "second best," poor boy), he has been using thieves to try and wrest the Magic Lamp that lies buried in the Cave of Wonders far from Agrabah. He's had little success as the Cave keeps chomping down on his thieves, while telling him that the only one who can enter must be "a diamond in the rough." In other words, bright, but not multi-faceted.

Aladdin, discovering that Abu has "Daliah's" bracelet, makes his own excuse to sneak into the palace to return it to her...and bring her tea. Still thinking she's "Daliah"—the real Daliah (Nasim Pedrad, who's delightful) tries to pretend she's the princess and sort of doesn't—Aladdin promises that he will try and see her again, but that becomes unlikely as he is arrested by the Royal Guard.

He is taken by the Guard to the Cave of Wonders, where Jafar tells him that the woman he met was not the handmaiden, but the actual princess. He instructs him to retrieve the lamp, and Jafar will make him a rich enough man to impress the princess—but don't take anything else...or he will be killed, either by the cave or by Jafar. Abu, however, is too dazzled by the many jewels in the cave (or it merely thinks "Hey, the kid will get killed, not me") so he takes a really big red ruby just as Aladdin grabs the lamp.

The cave, of course, is not happy, so decides to...cave. But, not before Aladdin, in trying to get Jafar his prize, discovers what a heel the Vizier is, and only manages to survive by the interventions of Abu and a Magic Flying Carpet—which (I neglected to mention) Aladdin had rescued in the cave. 

Oh. And Abu steals the lamp back from Jafar. Cut to the jinn, they rub the lamp, genie appears and it's Will Smith and not Robin Williams...

...which, as it turns out, is not a bad thing. Bless Will Smith, who knew...just knew...that everybody was going to compare him to Williams** and he would always come up short. And he took the job, anyway. And, surprise, he makes it his own. He's great in this. Lines are similar, but Smith brings his own charm to it and his own spin and he's a lot of fun. Check out the video below of the first minute of "Prince Ali"—it's a pinch slower (just ever so slightly), but he sells the thing for all it's worth...and (here's a plus), you can understand the lyrics without having to go to the internet. 

Yes, he definitely is contemporary (and I didn't hear you complaining when Williams had his period accurate William F. Buckley imitation come out of the genie), but then, Disney has never been too concerned with any flavor of the times other than the audience's. Smith isn't doing stand-up—he's bringing the most out of the material using his particular gifts and they are considerable. This is not an either/or situation. Both interpretations can exist without replacing one or the other. Both are applaudable; Williams created one of the greatest vocal performances in cartoons (on a par with Mel Blanc) and Smith has done as much with his as is humanly possible.

Now, Robin Williams is the stand-out of the 92 version; everybody else in it is competent  and gets the job done. This version, there's more pressure on the actors because they have no help from animators enhancing their performances. They gotta do all the work themselves, and they live up to it. Massoud's Aladdin is less of a bland Tom Cruise stand-in and he does a lovely job of playing amusingly painful discomfort—and more than one time I thought "was he dubbed by Hayden Christensen?" as he stammered through a line. Vast improvement.

And I found Negahban's performance as Jafar fascinating. He's not the angular Basil Rathbone type as the cartoon, but a seething one with large dead eyes that burn through the screen and an expressiveness that is subtle and slightly quirky. It's a performance that reminded me of the intensity of the young Christopher Lee, who could mime evil with only the slightest hint of acting. When he unloads and takes it to "11" in the final act, it's a lovely bit of CGI-chewing. 

And Scott is a real find, capable of the comedy but with a serene grace that, well, basically explodes when called on to belt out a song—and director Ritchie loves taking advantage of that by giving her...not one...but two moments in the movie where she swings into the camera and pegs the VU-meter, that might cause some to rock back in their theater-seats. I would advise audience members to watch out for their knees whenever she has a solo. Could be painful.

If one wonders why the movie has expanded to two hours from the ninety minutes of the original, chalk it up to the slightly slower pacing of real life from animation...and the dancing. There are a few extended dance sequences that pad the pace a bit.

One other quibble: the whole "Tell Her the Truth" lesson on which the movie is based—that Aladdin should come clean about not being a prince and just be himself to impress the princess. Oh, yes, hear, hear. Honesty is the best policy. But, the devil on my shoulder would like him to cap his confession with a "That's who I am...'Daliah!'" Okay, a bit churlish, I know, discretion being the better part of valor...but at least they have that one thing in common.

But, on the whole, a good show, actually worthy of the effort, and Ritchie shows himself very deft at spectacle, even using more of an eye-popping palette of colors than the desaturated look he favored in his last few films. And he makes the thing move like crazy, approaching the zip of animation, which gives it far more energy and verve than the last few Disney films that tried to move beyond the animation table. It doesn't replace the animated version. But it certainly becomes it.

* Makes me wonder why they don't just make a movie called "Cash-Cow" and admit it.

** Compounded by the fact that Williams is dead, and everybody—now that he's gone—has a case of the "guilt's" because they didn't appreciate him nearly enough when he was alive. Cue the Joni Mitchell song.

Suicide Squad

Buzz-Kill
or
"Puddin', He's Ruining Date Night!!"

It's hard to say why Suicide Squad leaves such a bad taste in the brain. It is, at least, coherent in the story-telling (the insistence of graphics in the first half-hour is another story*) and is easily followed even if its attention wanders like a five year old on sugar. Based on a second-tier DC comic featuring a "Dirty Dozen" team of "super-villains,"** organized by one of DC's ever-increasing number of government agencies (does DC stand for "DemoCrat?), they take on super-human threats that the "nice" super-teams don't touch...or find out about.

It takes place in the continuity of the DC Movie Universe after the apparent death of Superman (in Batman v Superman: Damn of Justice) when a government operative named Amanda Waller (played by a non-nonsense Viola Davis, who seizes the screen every time she walks in a room) devises a plan that keeps stock of "meta-humans" and coerces them to do her or the government's bidding. Amanda's showed up in other DC properties (like the CW's "Arrow" and "Smallville") and her mantra is "What if the next Superman becomes a terrorist?" There's only so much kryptonite to go around, so she recruits criminals with "special skills" who might be able to take on such a threat. But her idea of doing that is using folks like Deadshot (who shoots good), Harley Quinn (who uses a baseball bat), Slipknot (good with knots...???), Killer Croc, a human alligator and...Captain Boomerang.

These guys will take down a Superman? Not bloody likely.

But, let that pass. She does recruit a remorseful ganger named El Diablo (Jay Hernandez) who has considerably more fire-power (literally) and The Enchantress (Cara Delavingne), an archaeologist named June Moone (go ahead and laugh, Marvel-zombies, then tell me how great a name Victor von Doom is) who is possessed by the spirit of a centuries old witch and becomes Waller's go-to prestidigitator. She uses her best commando, Lt. Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman, looking perpetually miserable), to keep her manageable, but Moon and Flag fall in love and in the time that Dick York can blurt "Sa-a-am!" things get a little out of hand.

Moone's witch-renter gets a little cranky and takes over command from her host, resurrects her warlock-brother using a stray passer-by, and the two start construction on a thing that makes a big light in the sky, to what end the movie never makes clear other than to employ some special effects houses and direct opponents to their exact position. Not sure why superhero villains like to do this, but they sure seem to do it a lot in the movies. Waller coordinates her select villains, puts a remote mini-bomb into their necks to keep them grudgingly compliant (but no less belligerent) and sends them on their surly way.

The mission is to harness Enchantress and put a stop to the big swirling bright thing pointing into the sky. None of these villains has any great skills that might hinder anything supernatural (bullets, boomerangs, baseball bats?) so the only thing they're good for is to slice through the hordes of humans the Enchantress has turned into walking pudding-pops that seem to have the same ability to attract direct hits that Imperial Stormtroopers do and, from the looks of things, also have a very low threshold of death. Convenient.

Each of the Squad finds a reason (aside from the pains in their necks) to voluntarily put themselves in harms' way, usually tied to their origin stories. Deadshot's is a flashback to when he was captured by Batman (Ben Affleck, now that he's committed) entirely due to the intervention of his beloved 11 year old daughter. Harley's is tied to her work at Arkham Asylum as a psychiatrist and coming under the thrall of The Joker (Jared Leto, good enough but he'll never become a Hallmark Christmas Ornament) Captain Boomerang gets caught by The Flash (Ezra Miller in costumed cameo) during a botched robbery that turns back on him. El Diablo's flash-fires back to his gang-banger days and the death of his family. Everybody else has to wait for the sequel for theirs, I guess.

Except for Slipknot (Adam Beach...and he's a favorite of mine, too!)

Now, director David Ayer can be a very effective director with a knack for the off-putting as is displayed in his controversial police-cam masquerading as a movie End of Watch and the Brad Pitt WWII tank-drama Fury. Both movies have things that were actually arresting, like Fury's field-jousting with tanks and EOW's in-your-face pacing with a perpetual overlay of dread. Ayer is good at portraying sacrifice and selflessness in the midst of looming destruction, which would make you think that something like Suicide Squad would be right in his wheelhouse.

There is some of that; fleeting moments of "why am I doing this, again? Oh yeah, I know." But they flit by and, given the rest of the movie, they're out of place. They're also out of "pace." You can tell when something is VERY IMPORTANT when Ayer tosses in the slow-motion for far too long and for far too much emphasis. You almost want to wave him along, especially when the rest of the movie—except for a couple of thudding laugh-lines—moves along rather zippily.

Sometimes too much so. I've mentioned the graphics sequences that pop up and disappear before you can register what they're saying. Those sequences are so out of whack from the rest of the movie, you get the impression they came from another filmmaker. One hears rumors. One is that there were two competing edits of the movie—one that was supervised by Ayer and another that was supervised by the trailer-house that made the admittedly excellent trailers for the film. 

Bad idea. Ayer is a storyteller. Trailer-editors are marketers. The jobs are completely different. As good as those trailers are (and I've included them below) they aren't a story. They're a collage, a highlights real. It doesn't have to make sense, merely make money. Trailers are sizzle. Movies are a meal. At least they're supposed to be. It's wrong to sell the sizzle and offer a plate of steaming tofu. You're defeating the purpose of the trailer in the first place. It's false advertising. More importantly, if you're splicing together a film from those different sources with their different agendas, you're not making a movie, you're constructing a Frankenstein monster out of disparate parts.

While I'm on the subject, as good as those trailers are, they're an even better example of TMI. This is getting to be a disastrous trend. That first trailer played at Comic-Con for an audience of comics and movie-geeks and was designed to quell the masses, to douse the torches, and dull the pitchforks of their rebellious target-group (that's an exercise in futility—read the comments and you'll find bubble-people who don't like anything that's not originating from their heads).  Reassure them that the Joker is "edgy" (the way you like him), Harley Quinn is "hot" (the kind boys like—not precisely how she is in the comics or the animated series she sprang from), or that even Captain Boomerang doesn't look silly. The schizy target audience wants the comic book characters taken oh-so-seriously, but with a lot of humor. How bi-polar is that? 

But, to appease the fickle and volatile target audience, you run the risk of squeezing every last drop of surprise or discovery out of a movie. You don't start a poker hand showing all your cards on the table.*** And if it happens, you'd better be damned sure the rest of the movie holds up and surpasses its hype. And Suicide Squad does not.

It is designed to an inch of its life. The casting is very well done; even Will Smith manages to make Deadshot seem like a distillation of every Will Smith character from his last ten movies (a combination of hard wise-ass and sentimental softie). But all of those Frankenstein body-parts does not add up to a satisfying movie or movie experience. For whatever reason, and there are many, not just with the movie but its selling and franchise-hyping, they contribute to making the movie an indifferent exercise on first—and more importantly, last—viewing.

My, my. Quite a long review for a movie I had a dull reaction to. But, the many issues it raises in "the culture" padded the thing out. I'll just let Leto's Joker sum it up succinctly:

"Really...Really...Bad"

* It's cute when Tarantino does it, it's entertaining in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but in Suicide Squad, it is irritating and even obfuscating—it tells you less than if they had no graphics at all, if such a thing is possible. They throw so much crap at the screen and in such flashing illegible fonts that you just kind of give-up trying to follow and dismiss it with "it's not important..." Maybe they're trying to encourage multiple viewings by leaving viewers in the dust, but I won't be seeing this twice—what's the point?—and only a devotee would buy the DVD to slow down the retinal-image-defying graphics to be able to see them. Frankly, I'd rather not spend MORE time watching this, even if it DOES reveal that one of the weapons that Deadshot is an expert with is a potato-gun.  That sort of registered as it flashed by. Useful. And telling.

** The cast in the comics has changed over the years—they do specialize in suicide missions—but the movie features Batman villains Deadshot, Harley Quinn and Killer Croc (not only does he have the best toys, he has the best villains, for example....), Captain Boomerang (who battles the super-speeding Flash with...boomerangs), El Diablo (from "All-Star Westerns", originally), Slipknot (from "Firestorm"), Enchantress (from "Strange Adventures" and the "Superman" titles) and the non-villainous Katana (from "Batman and The Outsiders"). At least they didn't include Bronze Tiger.

*** There's another aspect to this: the video fan-press has created a cottage industry of hyper-ventilating fan-people who parse each single image of a trailer in an attempt to "divine" every last tidbit of information that can be gleaned from it, like pigs snuffling for truffles. There are videos of up to 30 to 40 minutes analyzing a 3 minute trailer, with as much misinformation and unsupported speculation as fact. That's nuts, and that kind of spoon-feeding can't come to any good for an audience-member wanting to be satisfied...or entertained.

Hancock

Hancock (Peter Berg, 2008) The premise (for a super-hero movie) is interesting, the stars are all competent, and in some cases exceptional (Charlize Theron puts in quite a surprising turn in her role), and the writing sometimes refreshing.  

What kills Hancock is the direction. Berg's snatch-and-grab semi-documentary style worked gangbusters for Friday Night Lights, but for the super-heroics of Hancock, you just get the impression that they're trying to hide some flaw in the effects from you, especially in the inevitable fisticuffs that these things seem to depend on (although the cleverer ones find ways around it).

Will Smith plays John Hancock, who can bend steel in his bare hands, but would rather bend his elbow. He's alcoholic, down and out and super-depressed. Most super-heroes are high and flying, but Hancock takes it the wrong way, so rather than looking up in the sky for him, chances are the best place to find him is the gutter. He has powers and abilities far beyond mortal men, but no idea who he is, how he got that way, and there's no messianic father-figure to tell him the back-story. And yeah, he'll do all that super-heroic stuff, but he's too stoned out of his mind to do anything carefully—he's like a bull in a china shop, and every time he does some good, he does a lot more harm in property damage.

After saving the life of marketing maven Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman), Hancock is taken under wing, sobered up, read the "with great power comes great responsibility speech," and given a better public image (rather than a secret identity), a leather "sooper-suit," and is supervised in his derring-do so that he first does no harm.

Hancock isn't very good, but it has an interesting take on things "Superman-ish," and when you see Man of Steel, the latest "official" Superman movie, you'll see some of the ideas brought back to the source—the colliding bodies, the city-wide collateral damage, and the hard edge of sci-fi aspect to things that most super-hero movies tend to miss for the musculature and myth-making. Also, the script has a literal vulnerability for the super-dude that's far more ingenious than sticks and kryptonite-stones. You wanna reduce Superman's effectiveness?  Attack him through his loved ones. Hancock takes that one step further by making his loved ones his true weakness, making him vulnerable, and shortening his life, taking the "apart-ness" of the super-hero, bringing it from the sub-text to the foreground, and lending the whole thing a nice melancholy touch that's missing from the genre as a whole. It also brings Will Smith nicely down to earth, as well.

Focus (2015)

The Little Blind Mouse ("When You Knew That It was Over, You Were Suddenly Aware...)
or
"...And Then the Girl Walked In" ("That the Autumn Leaves Were Turning to the Color of Her Hair")


Round, like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
Like a snowball down a mountain
Or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that's turning
Running rings around the moon.
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple turning silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind.


Man, Focus is derivative. The whole Man/Woman/ Con Game story is rather done to death. Name your favorite: The Lady Eve? To Catch a Thief? Out of Sight? You could so far as the recent entry into The National Film Registry, Unmasked made back in 1917 and the conceit of a love story and "The War Between Men and Women" embedded in a con-artist plot. The one that film-makers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (who made Crazy, Stupid Love and I Love You, Phillip Morris and wrote Bad Santa, and are the reasons I wanted to see this one, despite some dismal reviews) seem to be mindful of is The Thomas Crown Affair (the Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway original, not the Pierce Brosnan-Rene Russo re-tread) as they use "The Windmills of Your Mind" in the End Credits.

But, it's one of those movies that you have to pay really close attention to—focused, if you will, for the movie sleight-of-hand, the hidden signals, the "tell's," of what's going on under the surface, or else you could be conned as easily as one of the movie's marks. At the end, you still feel a bit conned, if only because one (actually, two) of the characters who should be better at all this, isn't...or as much as you'd like them to be.

Nicky Spurgeon (Will Smith in fine form) is a well-established grifter, the third generation leader in a well-organized network of stingers, who don't go in for the long con, as much as going for volume—they find a public event with a lot of people in unfamiliar territory—a convention, say, or the Super-Bowl, and take the high-rollers and do some rolling of their own. Nicky is about to do some real-estate investing for a future base of operations when he has a chance encounter with Jess (Margot Robbie, in fine form also)—it's a "meet-cute" in a con-artist kind of way where he rescues her from a lothario by following her lead and posing as her date to lose the guy.  

One thing leads to another, one drink leads to another, but to reveal the outcome of the "meet-cute" would be telling. Let's just say that Jess is a con woman in training and lousy at it ("You SUCK!" is how Nicky puts it) and wants to learn. Nicky makes a good teacher, but a lousy mentor, warning about how "the work" requires no heart, citing as an example "The Toledo Panic Button" (totally fictitious) where if the con is "blown," you shoot your partner (please see The Sting) in order to prove your loyalty to your mark to preserve the con.  

"This is a game of focus," he explains. "Dabblers get killed."  

And distraction is the name of the game. "Your look is the spotlight," he says when demonstrating a "lift" "and we dance in the dark."

Those who can't do, teach (those who can't teach, teach gym). Jess is recruited ("Congratulations" says his right-hand man Horst—Brennan Brown, who's terrific—"you're a criminal..."). On a street in the French Quarter in N'Orleans, she's put through her paces, playing the distraction, doing snatch-and-grabs and fast hand-offs while Nicky observes admiringly from a balcony. 

"Congratulations, you're a criminal..."

Jess is a fast study—much better at pick-pocketing than being simply the distraction. She picks it up so fast and with such skill—going from "0" to "60" in one fast-edited sequence—that I kept expecting the writer-film-makers to do something with that (a hidden past, an unnatural deftness, a secret save, some-thing) making it a key element in a change-up that would throw the audience off the course of what looked to be a pretty standard romance with a little larceny and lying mixed in with it. No such luck. Ficarra and Requa are clever guys, but they do Robbie (or the audience) no favors here. Things proceed along with not much growth in her character, relegating it to "girl-friend" status. 

Smith's Nicky, has the big character arc, but not much of one. After the "Training of Jess" section, the movie goes to the next section, set three years later where Nicky is negotiating a scam with race-car driver/billionaire pretty-boy Rafael Garriga (Rodrigo Santoro) to bilk a competitor (Robert Taylor) into buying a software system to improve his cars' performance—Nicky's going to pose as a "disgruntled employee" of Garriga's who wants revenge on his fictionally former employer by selling the "secret" of his race-cars to his competitor for a huge sum and then remotely disabling it once he's blown the scene. To set up the scam, Nicky and Rafael will get in a heated fight in a public setting—a big swanky affair Garriga is throwing for all the racing teams of an upcoming race.  Things are going very well...

"And then the girl walked in..."

"And then the girl walked in..." as Nicky's co-conspirator Farhad (Adrian Martinez, who is also terrific) grouses at him. Yup, coincidence of coincidences, Jess is at the party, making her entrance from Garriga's upstairs and attaching herself to his arm. This so unnerves Nicky that he carries the act a bit too far, and oversells the antagonism to be displayed between the two men. Jess explains that she's with Garriga now, giving up her pick-pocketing ways and wanting to have nothing to do with Nicky after how everything ended in New Orleans (I can't give too much away here).

The two then start a subtle dance of "He Said/She Said/He Feels/She Feels" in which you're not exactly sure who's conning whom, but for awhile it looks like Nicky might be getting some kind of comeuppance from his former protege, with the added threat that he's being watched like a grizzled Hawk by Garriga's security man Owens (Gerald McRaney, who is also damned terrific*), who suspects that Nicky, their con-man, might actually be a con-man and betray them. Pretty soon, Nicky is forgetting his own lessons, upping the stakes for not only the gain, but the girl, too.

Jess observes Nicky observing.

The way the movie (and the con) play out, it's clear that Smith is the guy in charge, both in front of and behind the camera, as his character, whatever his motivations, knows everything that's going on, and the rest of the characters (and the audience) are left dancing in the dark (although it's more like a lead-footed shuffle than a dance). One wishes that there was enough trust in the material and the cast playing it that there was more for one of the major characters (and the audience) to do than merely play "the blind little mouse" (as it's called in the film)—left in the dark until you're not. There could have been another dimension, a character complication, maybe a lingering and practical doubt or edge, even some growth of other characters that could have thrown a little more sand in the film, making it a bit more rich than being just a vanity project for Will Smith (and the movie does play to his strengths and considerable charm). But, ultimately, that's what the movie amounts to, and that is disappointing, if not exactly a con-job.

What we are left with is that, at least, the movie is relatively free of inconsistency** and plays by its own self-imposed rules even while it's cheating. One goes back through the movie looking for holes with the new-found knowledge of how it's been resolved—and there are instances, that can be explained away by character, as opposed to function. Except for a little movie-subterfuge here and there, the logic presented is solid, as the images unwind like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind.

* McRaney is so good that this lower-waged character actor manages to draw attention even from his highly-paid co-star (in much the same way that Darren McGavin completely overshadowed Robert Redford in their scenes together in The Natural).

** Okay, one thing: how does Garriga's driver find Nicky—out of the streets of Buenos Aries, how does he find the one Nicky is using to escape to stop him. Is Nicky's car "bugged?"  Is someone else?