PLEASE DON’T READ THE FOLLOWING IF YOU ARE NOT PREPARED TO HAVE THE SURPRISE ENDING OF THIS MOVIE REVEALED.

     Confidence is the latest in a line of movies about con artists that depend as much on conning their audiences as their deceptive heroes do on fleecing their marks. You would think audiences would rebel against this practice but they’ve consistently rewarded it with box office success, from The Sting (1973), which made it widely acceptable, to The Usual Suspects (1995), which made it hip in dweebish sort of way.

     Confidence, which was directed by James Foley from a screenplay by Doug Jung, is so shamelessly determined to hoodwink the viewer, that it isn’t even discreet about it. In what has to be the rawest – and most obvious – lie to ever open a movie, Foley begins with an overhead crane or elevator shot (actually, it might even have been a zoom) over the bloody body of protagonist Jake Vig. We know it is Jake because he’s telling us it is him in voice-over. He’s also telling us that he’s dead and not implausible, if infrequently invoked device, thanks to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard.

     The polygraph that sits inside every veteran filmgoer’s head should be smoking from overload. No Hollywood picture is going to let its hero die, whether at the end of the beginning, no matter how unpleasant he may be. And, indeed, Jake turns out at movie’s end not to be dead. The whole thing was just a trick, not on characters in the film, but on the audience. Afraid that they didn’t have the skill to let viewers in on all the action and still keep them on the edge of their seats, Foley and Jung just lied. It is a cheap carny trick.

     Jake is a greedy and, as most people he meets observe, arrogant crook. Rather than soften his edges by casting a typically smooth star, Confidence’s makers have cast the abrasive Ed Burns. Burns’s own overweening self-confidence is never far from the surface in any of his roles, and here Foley has allowed it to burst force in all its suffocating glory.

     Jake is set down amidst an otherwise familiar set of characters. There’s his crew of fellow con artists: Runyonesque Gordo (Paul Giamatti); lumbering Al (Lou Lombardi); and, for Jake to talk to, average Miles (Brian Val Holt). Up against him is the gangster he accidentally fleeced, The King (Dustin Hoffman, hammier than usual), who sports the requisite number of goons. There’s a couple of crooked cops (Luis Guzman and Donal Logue). And, somewhere in the middle, The Dame, the hardboiled sexy Lily (scintillating Rachel Weisz, who gives the best performance). So Jake’s contrary personality, and its cloudy motivations, give a lot of the cons their mystery, because he’s the one character you can’t figure out after his first scene.

     Somewhat startlingly, the film makes virtually nothing of its Los Angeles setting, even though the characters keep mentioning how they’ve got to get out of town or can’t stand the town or love it or what have you. Every street and room looks the same as another, so what’s to love or hate?

     Foley’s style isn’t visually driven, but his film does cut together well (and he uses a clever scene-shifting device), so there’s a nice flow to the action. All the pauses are in the right place (no small thing in these days of video and TV commercial directors), and the action builds and fades, rather than races and sputters.

     But the movie could just as well have been called The Big Cheat. There isn’t anything near enough in the way of character to make Confidence worthwhile as a study of criminals under pressure. There’s not enough pure suspense to make it a taut crime drama. It’s meant to be fluffy, serio-comic, and semi-romantic. That’s just the sort of movie that has to play fair with its audience if its going to transcend the cotton candy (see Stanley Donen’s 1963 Charade, the last word in this sort of film). Once it shoots its credibility (in the first shot, yet), it has got nothing left.