Bad Clumps

Rating: Null/10 (7 November 2006)

I did not enjoy this, which is a rare thing among so-called con movies.
The idea in con movies is that there is a game among certain players, at least including the writer and the viewer. Sometimes there are on screen detectives and discoverers as well. We have those here in Tucci's detective and the "girl next door." And then there are the marks. When you have all these folks as discoverers of the real story, there are all sorts of opportunities for us to be fooled. Its the detective genre with multiple facets.
In order to be effective, you have to have some things be very "readable" and others unexpected and novel. In this case, you have at least 5 cons, possibly seven. But they simply aren't fun. I think it is in part because they aren't different enough from each other. More important is the apparent rule that when you have several "semantic distances" (that is: the distance between discoverer and the discovery), they all have to be the same. Lest you think this is something impossible to see or measure.
In this case, all the cons are of similar types (bad) and different semantic distances (also bad).
"Old Boy" despite its other flaws, got this part right, the distance part. Its quite similar in its con(s) but understood this notion of watching and equal distance. Both are stylish, but compare the effectiveness.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.