CON JOB REVIEW
Ian Niles’ juvenile indie comedy has a few rare moments of wit
Comedy can be so subjective that something that might be funny to one person might not even get a chuckle out of anyone else. That might be an obvious statement, but it’s also one of the biggest hurdles facing Ian Niles’ dark comedy, which follows a group of man-children who hatch a scheme that runs into all sorts of travails.
Niles himself plays Chris, who is plotting a scheme with his friend Angus (Menuhin Hart) to con the latter’s brother Tim (Dean Edwards) out of their childhood home. Tim has just returned from Thailand, having spent ten years there after his brother Angus slept with his wife; he returns under the pretense that Chris is getting married. Also present is Chris’ friend Jordan, a muscle-bound knucklehead who is constantly doping and yelling everything, as if he’s promoting a professional wrestling bout. The group orders $750 in steaks via delivery that’s stolen by the hot delivery girl after Chris has sex with her for reasons only a filmmaker writing their own part might come up with.
Surely, the movie is going to be about the guys trying to find her to get their money back and/or get revenge, right? Nope. That bit of the movie just happens, but it’s not the “con job” referred by the title. Con Job starts out like such a profanity-filled bro movie that it’s hard to really get into any of the set-up with characters who take far too long to click. Other than Chris and Angus, there are so many characters who pop in and out of the story with no real rhyme, reason or resolution, as if many of the actors are just doing Niles a favor with a few hours of work.
Things really pick up when T.L. Flint shows up as the gun-toting “Jeff,” who is pretending to be Tim to fulfill the ruse and get the proper paperwork notarized. Flint ends up being a brilliant character who really understands what’s required of his role, and he could easily take on any role that the Wu Tang’s Method Man has ever played. I would be delighted to see Flint doing more comedic work after seeing him in Con Job.
Either way, there’s no way around the fact that Niles is the weakest link in terms of the acting performances in his own film, creating such a bland white-boy character amidst so many stronger comedic actors. I wouldn’t consider myself a prude by any means, but Niles’ dialogue leans so heavily on the profanity, presuming that throwing the F-word into every other sentence might help elicit laughs in a movie with no real jokes, just many awkward situations where people are randomly killed.
In many ways, Con Job reminds me of a very early Peter Berg dark comedy from 1998 called Very Bad Things, which I detested when I first saw it, though it did grow on me slightly in the years since. Con Job tries to use movies like Tom Hanks’ Bachelor Party as a jumping-off point to get the audience laughing, but there’s just so much that isn’t funny but is also so juvenile that you’d have to be pretty dumb to enjoy. (An early projecting vomiting gag immediately comes to mind.) Maybe to some viewers that will be enough, but it’s tough sometimes to fully appreciate what Niles might be trying to accomplish with a story that takes far too long to find its footing despite being less than 90 minutes long.
Saying that Con Job gets better as it goes along would only be inaccurate, since it’s a movie that starts off so horribly that it can only get better. If it got worse than those first 15 or 20 minutes, it would have been absolutely unwatchable, and I would have walked out of any theater playing it.
Con Job isn’t great, although the characters do start to grow on you, to the point where it almost wins you over by what ends up being a truly bizarre ending. (Someone actually wrote an original song that incorporated many of the characters and what happens in the movie!) Even so, the premise never really has very much going for it, so it mostly can be appreciated for the dedication of the cast Niles has assembled to improve on a premise that really shouldn’t have worked at all.
Rating: 5/10
Con Job recently played in theaters following its premiere at the Chelsea Film Festival.