* * *
This
film was so disappointing. It is incredibly hyped everywhere but it
really didn't meet my expectations for two reasons. Firstly, the
performances were solid but not exceedingly masterful. Secondly the plot
was confusing.It follows two con artists who team up with a police
officer to catch some dodgy politicians in the act of exchanging money
for deals. The film looks really interesting, aesthetically. I kept staring at every characters' hair! Amy Adam's in particular often looked perfect for most of the movie (although not in this poster). Similarly everyone moves dynamically which draws you into their acting. However this is ruined at bit for me because the camera then explicitly moves to show you a characters hands or some other body part with very little explanation. It seemed as though O'Russell was trying to point out, 'look at the acting, they even use their hands!' which is odd. You should allow the audience to look where they want, not float the camera around random body-parts of the actors.
I like a good fraud film (like Catch Me If You Can), I love a good confusing and layered plot (like Inception), I do not like this plot. The film opens with a scene that comes later on, so immediately you are a little confused, sadly this doesn't end. Throughout the film I was confused as to who was meant to be who and why everyone was doing everything. There was also a slight twist ending which I didn't find very interesting or shocking. To add to this, I didn't understand how they were hustling people. This could be me being really dense, although the other people I saw the film with agreed.
The performances were good. Everyone performed well, as you would expect with such big names. They seemed to milk the fact that Jennifer Lawrence was in it, giving her a useless but relatively funny scene of her dancing to Live and Let Die. Once again, unfortunately, it is the fact that I had heard so much about the acting that I thought it was going to be amazing and it wasn't. It was good, but nothing special.
This film seemed to me to be trying to be something it wasn't. There is a huge cast, lots of boobs and flashy outfits on display and this seems to be able to distract a large percentage of cinema goers into liking the film. Unfortunately I couldn't get past the fairly mediocre script, which thought it was profound, and overly complicated and not well explained plot. It isn't a bad film, it is simply over-hyped which makes me feel as though it is worse than it actually was.
