Ed Burns plays the leader of a crew of grifters who mistakenly rip off some money from a powerful and eccentric mobster. Rather than returning the money, Burns proposes to create a new custom sting for the boss (Dustin Hoffman), thus allowing the freaky criminal to gain some revenge on an old associate.
The mechanics of the sting are interesting, but it's not especially difficult to see the details which are supposed to be hidden from the audience. The secrets are altogether too obvious to people who regularly watch movies of this type. The most innovative element of
the sting is that Burns and his men have to devise the sting like a chess game, with several options that hinge on the behavior of the "marks".
The stylish sting seems to be properly conceived, but it is really the entire movie. The character development is minimal, so that by the end of the movie, the characters still remain strangers to the audience. There is some babble about the thrill of the con, but apart from that the characters' motivations and backgrounds are fundamentally unknown. They are people whose lives begin and end in the time frame of the film. They aren't people, but movie characters.
Dustin Hoffman seems to have gotten off on the sheer quirkiness of his role, and his audacious, mannered turn, filled with plenty of Hoffman's usual detailed character embellishments, provides some of the film's more interesting moments, but the filmmakers didn't really need an actor of his genius to play a "mark", and there was no reason for the character to be an aging, over-the-top mobster of questionable sexuality. (In fact, they rewrote the character when Hoffman came on board.)
It's a solid genre script which is given additional credibility by the presence of Hoffman, filmdom's greatest character actor, but I don't see much potential box office appeal to crossover audiences.
The mechanics of the sting are interesting, but it's not especially difficult to see the details which are supposed to be hidden from the audience. The secrets are altogether too obvious to people who regularly watch movies of this type. The most innovative element of
the sting is that Burns and his men have to devise the sting like a chess game, with several options that hinge on the behavior of the "marks".
The stylish sting seems to be properly conceived, but it is really the entire movie. The character development is minimal, so that by the end of the movie, the characters still remain strangers to the audience. There is some babble about the thrill of the con, but apart from that the characters' motivations and backgrounds are fundamentally unknown. They are people whose lives begin and end in the time frame of the film. They aren't people, but movie characters.
Dustin Hoffman seems to have gotten off on the sheer quirkiness of his role, and his audacious, mannered turn, filled with plenty of Hoffman's usual detailed character embellishments, provides some of the film's more interesting moments, but the filmmakers didn't really need an actor of his genius to play a "mark", and there was no reason for the character to be an aging, over-the-top mobster of questionable sexuality. (In fact, they rewrote the character when Hoffman came on board.)
It's a solid genre script which is given additional credibility by the presence of Hoffman, filmdom's greatest character actor, but I don't see much potential box office appeal to crossover audiences.