When Jess (Margot Robbie) uses a honey pot routine to pull a con on her mark in a bar one night she gets more than she bargains for as the mark is Nicky (Will Smith) who is a master conman himself. But from somewhere within her botched con a spark is lit and Smith decides to take her under his wing and teach her how to be a better con artist, so he brings her to New Orleans as a trial to work with his team in pulling various cons where she more than holds her own and fits straight in with Nicky’s team. Unfortunately it’s here, quite early in the movie, that the film reaches it’s peak when the best scene occurs as Nicky goes head to head in a high stakes of macho one upmanship against a high roller in a VIP box which watching a game of American football.

The film plods along okay without ever excelling but it loses itself in the final third which is set in Buenos Aires where Smith is going to pull a scam on Garriga a wealthy owner of a racing team but inadvertently runs into Robbie who has gone legit and is enjoying the high life as a Garrigas girlfriend and the film transcends into a, do they, don’t they still really love each other side plot which slows the pace of the movie down too much but needless to say that in a movie about con artists all is not as it seems and the final fifteen minutes goes someway towards rescuing the movie from the mire.

Some of the locations and the sets look great and ooze opulence while the two main characters dance their charade of double and triple crossing in the name of the con but the characters are given no depth, possibly because you’re not meant to know them given that they live a lie anyway, but this then distracts from the believability of the developing relationship of the main characters, we don’t know them, they don’t seem to know each other so why should we care?

Smith is okay as the sauve confident trickster and changes it up or down as needed but the real breakout from this movie is Robbie who shows that she is not just about sex appeal, shows great comedic timing when called for and good sentimentality when necessary.

As with most of these movies we always know there’s more than meets the eye and part of the fun is trying to stay a step ahead of the inevitable twists and turns but when they inevitably do arrive you feel a bit let down given the high standards set earlier in the movie so it lacks either the cleverness or the feel good factor of others movies from the same genre.

DJ Speaks Rating: 5.5 Out Of 10