I have seen plenty of movies over the years involving people trying to pull off elaborate and highly complicated swindles and while I suspect that The Sting (1973) is still considered the gold standard of such things, my favorites of this particular form are House of Games (1987) and The Spanish Prisoner (1998), two absolutely spellbinding thrillers from David Mamet exploring just how easily even the smartest and most aware of people can find themselves conned and corrupted. The reason why I prefer those films over the majority of its genre brethren is because while he was busy setting up and deploying his crafty narratives and genuinely surprising twists, Mamet was also exploring intriguing questions revolving around human nature and giving us complex and fascinating characters. Because of those inclusions, when the big twists did hit, they had a genuine dramatic impact. Most films along these lines, and I would include The Sting in that, spend so much time setting up the contrivances of the plotting and of the con games being played that they don’t have the time or energy for much of anything else. As a result, those films tend to play like mechanical exercises that are more concerned with pulling the rug out from under the characters than in making us feel any sort of interest in who they are or what is driving them other than the necessities of the narrative.
At first glance, Sharper, the feature film debut of Benjamin Caron, seems as if it is going to skew closer to the Mamet films than anything else. The initial scenes set up a potentially interesting story and introduced us to a pair of intriguing and nicely drawn characters. Alas, as it goes on and becomes increasingly trickier and elaborate, both in terms of its story and its framework, it becomes an increasingly hollow exercise that pulls the proverbial rug so many times throughout its running time that viewers, once they realize that most everything they have come to accept will most likely be revealed as a ruse in a few minutes, will find themselves growing increasingly detached from as it goes on. This is a shame because it has been made with a certain style and a good cast, both of which are sort of squandered here.
Because this is a film in which virtually every aspect of the plot could be described as a spoiler, I’ll will tread very carefully in my description. Suffice it to say, it opens in an unassuming New York bookstore run by Tom (Justice Smith) that grad student Sandra (Brianna Middleton) visits one day searching for a Zora Neale Hurston book. They hit it off immediately and soon begin seeing each other but while things seem fine between them, each seems to carrying a bit of unexplained and potentially worrisome baggage. Sandra, for example, wants to know why they always go to her place but never his, which he vaguely explains away by mentioning he lives with his ailing and estranged father. For her part, Sandra has a brother who is apparently in trouble with some bad guys and unless he repays the significant sum that he owes them, he won’t be long for this world. At this point, I will say no more about what is to come except to note that the story eventually expands to include such characters as super-rich mogul Richard (John Lithgow), his second wife Madeline (Julianne Moore) and slick outsider Max (Sebastien Shaw) and gets a lot more complex as things go on.
The early scenes of the film, the ones focusing on the burgeoning relationship between Tom and Sandra, are by far the best. Smith and Middleton make for a believable and immensely likable couple and so when the first big twist involving them kicks in, it has an actual dramatic impact because we have developed a rooting interest in them by that point in the film. However, as things go on and new characters and revelations are tossed into the mix, you can feel the strain in the screenplay by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka as they keep trying to snooker the audience by any means necessary. The various twists and deliberately convoluted times start to become a little too self-consciously “clever” for their own good and the last 20 minutes somehow manage to pull off the trick of coming across as both wildly implausible and incredibly predictable
Sharper is slickly made and the actors are certainly having fun going through their twisty paces. That may be enough for some viewers—especially those who mourn the absence of the medium-budget adult-oriented drama in recent years—but for those yearning for something more, it is ultimately about as empty as the shell that the poor dope who gets roped into playing a round of three-card monte ends up picking. If you are looking for a truly smart and engaging drama involving con artists and their upscale prey, I once again point you in the direction of House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner, films that hold up as beautifully today as they did when they were first released. Sharper, on the other hand, is little more than a slick time-waster and anyone hoping to get anything more out of it is going to come away from it feeling like a real sucker.