As far as crafting a game goes, at least screenwriters Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka begin Sharper with exactly the right character to act as an entryway into its twisted story. Tom (Justice Smith) is the perfect Everyman, a blank-enough slate onto whom one can transpose his or her own personality but also sympathetic enough as a protagonist that he escapes merely being a cardboard cutout of a character. We don’t learn much about the young man over the course of the movie, but the details we do learn, as well as how they affect and are affected by the machinations of the plot, move him inches closer to the audience, especially in comparison to the other three major characters here. This is a movie about ruthless confidence artists, after all, and Tom is a pawn in at least two big-picture deceptions here.
The second of the major characters (one hesitates to rank them in either conspicuousness or importance, so as to preserve the surprises in store) is Sandra (Briana Middleton), whom Tom meets as a customer in the bookstore he owns and operates all by himself. The two hit it off instantly, and to the credit of the actors’ palpable chemistry and off-the-charts likability, the romance that follows is palpable, even as it is obviously superficial to some degree for both of them. Neither of them seems all that interested in what they want out of this in the long term. They both simply appear to be in it for the fun each finds in the other, and the entire opening act is effective and affecting because of it.
Then, the first twist of the knife arrives, announcing the film’s intentions in a whirlwind of baffling acts of misdirection. Money problems threaten to tear the two apart, and then Sandra disappears from Tom’s life, just as the narrative moves backward in time to follow Sandra, to whom we are now reintroduced as something of a slick and quick-witted petty criminal. Something in Middleton’s performance shifts, too, when she meets and is taken in by the enigmatic and almost unreadable Max (Sebastian Stan). He teaches her the art of the con game, particularly how to deceive on an emotional and humanistic level more efficiently than most others might.
Obviously, the mere act of talking about the character of Max and the relationship between him and Sandra gives a little bit of the game away in regards to what the screenwriters and director Benjamin Caron are up to in their inventory of con-movie tricks here. This is why it is important to duck around certain details regarding the fourth character, a widow named Madeline (Julianne Moore), who has finished a complex task involving her inheritance. That’s about all one should discuss, but despite Moore’s fine performance, there just isn’t much to this character beyond being a device of the screenplay.
It all leads to an entirely anticlimactic showdown, in which guns are drawn and bullets are fired in a wide-open space, followed by the prestige of this particular magic trick in the form of What Was Really Going On. It doesn’t work, because Sharper undeniably begins as a story with some major promise in the form of characters worth investigating, only to prioritize the characters that are far less interesting.
Photo courtesy of Apple Original Films/A24
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