Forgotten Film Friday (bonus Sunday edition): Confidence

A review by Brooks Rich

This is going to be a quick write up as this is a film about con men and grifters and I don't want to spoil anything. Confidence came out in 2003 and it's a film heavily inspired by the works of Quentin Tarantino, Ocean's Eleven, and the film The Boondock Saints, which was an atom bomb of a film that inspired a wave of unorthodox and quirky crime filmes. I think Confidence is a much stronger film than Boondock Saints and yet sadly is a completely forgotten film. I'm not even sure it had a huge following when it was released.

Edward Burns, a perpetual almost star in Hollywood, plays Jake Vig, the leader of a group of con men in Los Angeles. They unintentionally steal money from a major crime figure and in order to save them, Jake formulates a plan to rip off a rival of the crime figure. That's all the summary this film needs. It's a film about cons. No story beat should be spoiled.

For some reason, Edward Burns never really broke out. Probably because his usual forays into big studio films are garbage, like A Sound of Thunder, and his best films are smaller indies like Confidence. I say small indies but the cast in Confidence is insane, with Burns joined by Rachel Weisz, Andy Garcia, and Dustin Hoffman, as well as Donal Logue, Luiz Guzman, and Paul Giamatti. This is a film where as time went on the cast became insane, Giamatti and Weisz were just getting big in 2003, but for some reason, this film is still mostly unknown.

The story is the reason to see a con film and Confidence is no different. Yes, it is derivative of other films of its ilk but it's got a slick style and attitude that works. Burns is a legit leading man in this and this is my favorite role of his. It's streaming on Peacock right now and I hope one day it gets to Netflix so a bigger audience can see it.

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