It is always interesting to me when a movie comes out with a great cast but gets a straight to home entertainment release. Sometimes it is pretty obvious why when you see it and others surprise you and just doesn’t make sense. The latest The Con Is On features a great cast including Tim Roth, Uma Thurman, Alice Eve, Sofia Vergara, Crispin Glover, Maggie Q, Stephen Fry, and Parker Posey, but does it have that something extra to make it stand out or will it fail to con the mark?

 

The Con Is On follows Harriet and Peter, a con-artist couple cooking up a jewel-theft scam in L.A. to pay off sexy gangster Irina. Having squandered Irina’s loot one drunken night, Harriet and Peter escape to Hollywood, where they plot to steal a priceless jewel from Peter’s loopy ex-wife to repay the debt. I knew nothing about this film other than the cast when going into this and was actually pleasantly surprised with the film as a whole. There are some funny moments and a fun cast of characters that despite being predictable still works well enough.

 

I have always love Tim Roth and he offers up a great performance with his usual swagger and often times no care in the world attitude. The rest of the cast are great as well with Posey and Glover stealing the show with their often over the top performances and crazed characters. Where this film struggles is trying to be something fresh as it kind of falls in a more generic and predictable pattern at times making it sort of lose some of the fun of it all.

 

If you are looking for a fun little movie with some great characters and a pretty fun heist style dark comedy then check this one out. The ending is a bit of a let down as it felt like they were trying to do something out of the box, but ended up making it feel like the entire movie was a waste of time, but prior to that I was all in.