Films about fraudsters have probably been made since Hollywood, and classics such as “Producers”, “Sting”, “Paper Moon” and somewhat newer ones such as “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”, “Ocean’s 11” or “Catch Me If You Can” many are still their favorite movies. The year 2023 opened another quality film about “Con Artists”, as these con artists are called in English, and “Sharper” is also an incredibly fun, exciting and intriguing film full of surprises and completely unexpected plots and denouements. It was “Sharper” and the film debut for already experienced television director Benjamin Caron, who shot this thriller based on a clever script by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka.
The story is divided into several chapters and each of them bears the name of one of the characters and is told from his/her perspective, and with each act we get a deeper perspective and the story becomes more and more connected. However, in films about fraudsters and those masterfully designed frauds, everything that was carefully and patiently built can fall apart like the house of the first little pig from the fable in the key and final part if it turns out that the foundations are bad and shaky. Although “Sharper” has its problems at the end, it was still an interesting and intriguing film in which we only get an impression of what it is about at the end of the first act.
I won’t spoil much of the plot itself, but we follow the first act from the perspective of Tom (Justice Smith), a young owner of an antique shop in New York, an unrealized writer in severe depression. However, his world will change completely when one day a young and charming literature student Sandra (Briana Middleton) walks into his shop looking for a book for her PhD. It will start as one of those true movie romances, but of course it’s all too good and perfect to be true. After extracting a considerable amount of money from Tom, Sandra will simply disappear, and we will understand that he is no ordinary bookseller either, but that his father is a billionaire, which is why Sandra targeted him.
Then we follow the story from her perspective, and as new characters appear, this interesting mosaic is finely assembled and filled. Some well-known actors appear there, such as the standard-excellent Julianne Moore, Sebastian Stan and John Lithgow, and it will be shown that nothing is as it seems at first. Although “Sharper” will certainly never have the status of the highlights of the genre that I mentioned at the beginning of the text, it was nevertheless an interesting, dynamic and high-quality, fast-paced film about greed, betrayal and incredible wealth that seems to be just waiting for someone to pick it up.