Watching beautiful people lie is one of cinema’s simplest pleasures, and Sharper’s puzzle-box tale of long cons and double-crosses provides a solid supply. Helmed by Benjamin Caron, who directed three episodes from the first season of Andor, this slick-looking crime drama starts with a meet-cute inside a Lower East Side bookstore. Tom (Justice Smith) runs the shop by himself, retreating from the world after one too many heartbreaks to a place where he can hide behind piles of rare tomes. When Sandra (Brianna Middleton) wanders in one day, they tumble headfirst into a whirlwind romance, waxing lyrical over first editions and Fellini films in a way that never feels overly pretentious or self-conscious.
The couple’s honeymoon phase is cut short by a banging on the door in the dead of night. Sandra explains that her brother has gotten in way too deep with some dangerous people, and while she desperately wants to help him, she doesn’t have the money to pay them off. If only somebody could help her. Perhaps a bookish young man with access to a family fortune?
Naturally, nobody in Sharper is quite what they seem. Written by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka, the film is divided into chapters, each named after a different character and starting from a different point in the narrative, slowly revealing a nesting doll of cons within cons, and with Tom and Sandra at the center. We meet Max (Sebastian Stan), a seasoned grifter with a plan to turn their situation to his advantage while his doting mother, Madeline (Julianne Moore), watches on aghast. And there’s Richard (John Lithgow), the savvy billionaire whose fortune and its many claimants are soon revealed to be the true driving force of the film’s plot.
Fittingly for a tale that begins inside a bookstore, Sharper is a cautionary tale about judging a book by its cover. Almost every character is ultimately revealed to have an ulterior motive or an angle they’re playing. “You can’t con an honest man” is a refrain we hear on a couple of occasions, and the more we learn about each character, the less anyone appears to be fully innocent. Which means, in any given scene, you can’t be too sure just who’s getting conned.
The film makes good use of its New York setting, shifting between the dive bars where cons are devised and the luxurious, upper-crust apartments and hotel rooms where the marks are targeted, allowing the actors to show off their chameleonic skills as they switch up their personas to suit each environment. Wherever they are, there’s an unfussy elegance to the way Sharper is shot, with a cool, detached style that’s broken only by the intimate early sequence where Tom and Sandra get to know one another. As a result, their burgeoning relationship feels like the one warm spot in a world run by the coldest of calculations.
While Sharper’s schemes never come close to the clockwork precision of those found in Better Call Saul or even the Ocean’s franchise, they move along smoothly enough. That is, until the end. The film’s finale revolves around an incredibly silly stand-off that trades sly confidence games for pantomime shenanigans with billion-dollar consequences. It’s all so absurd that it quickly starts to bear an unfortunate resemblance to an episode of Community that culminates in an increasingly ludicrous series of fake deaths and double-crosses.
To make matters worse, Sharper then spends its final chapter painstakingly explaining how its not particularly clever last con was constructed, complete with gratuitous flashbacks to events that the audience saw an hour ago. That fumbled ending lets the air out of what is otherwise a fun and quietly stylish caper. It just doesn’t make the cleanest getaway.
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