Interesting. Rian Johnson debuted his career with a genre I typically don’t care for, only to follow it up with another genre I don’t really care for: the con-man, double-crossing, triple-crossing genre. The conceit here is humorous. We’re made to identify with a character who wants out of the con business and feels the game is too old to really satisfy. The audience is Bloom, tired of every “one-last-con” movie in the history of con movies. Johnson aims for his con movie to be different than the last one we saw, and while he lures us back in for “one last” scheme that promises contrast, his film can’t help but bludgeon us down the same old con-within-con rabbit hole we’ve seen countless times before. You feel like you’re one step ahead of the game, then you’re cleverly fooled, ahead of the game, fooled, rinse and repeat. Ebert once again nails it: “we think we’re in on the moves of the con, and then we think we’re not, and then we’re not sure, and then we’re wrong, and then we’re right, and then we’re wrong again, and we’re entertained up to another certain point, and then we vote with Bloom: The game gets old.” It sounds entertaining at first, but it just gets exhausting after awhile. 

Similar to the overly complicated plotting of BRICK, the film provides all the twists and turns inherent in this wearily convoluted genre. Because of this, it doesn’t matter where the con ends and real life begins. It doesn’t matter what’s real and what’s fake, what’s written and what’s unwritten, because the endless fakery is integral to its style. This “One Last Con” of a movie really only cares about its adulated style and little else. It’s more like Stephen and less like Bloom, too satisfied with its whimsical artificiality and never gives you characters worth believing in. I can see an interpretation of the ending that favors the real, unwritten life of Bloom as one that dooms Stephen’s predictable bluff to the grave, as though this were a deconstruction of the genre’s conventional con-man. I found this kinda clever. Problem is, in a world where the same tricks are played over and over again, the ending revelation arrives too late. The film will really only appeal to lovers of the formula, for everyone else you just want the thing to be over with. I’ll close with a banger from Ebert: 

“The problem with the movie is that the cons have too many encores and curtain calls. We tire of being (rhymes with perked) off. When an exercise seems to continue for its own sake, it should sense it has lost its audience, take a bow and sit down.”

Johnson Ranked