Sharper Review

Sharper premieres February 17, 2023 on Apple TV+.

The A24 and AppleTV+ thriller Sharper is a movie that manages to make the same mistake as much longer TV shows like Westworld and Dollhouse: overusing the reveal that a character isn’t who they seem to be and failing to come up with new turns to keep us on our toes. When the twist stops eliciting surprise, it leaves behind a sense of wary fatigue. No one wants to feel like an easy mark.

That’s a problem for a film that aspires to the intricate high-stakes intrigue of The Spanish Prisoner but lacks David Mamet’s sharp dialogue or brilliantly executed twists. Instead, Sharper relies heavily on a nested sequence of flashbacks and flash-forwards that follow different characters to reveal how they built elaborate lies that work on their marks, even if they never feel believable enough to string us along.

The plot kicks off following Tom (Justice Smith), a sensitive bookstore owner who seemingly meets the girl of his dreams in Sandra (Brianna Middleton). When she leaves him heartbroken and out 350,000,ドル the genre shifts from the whirlwind romance to a lay out a complex web of intrigue. The twists are heavily telegraphed, but the performances are still magnetic enough to sell them.

Sebastian Stan oozes greasy charisma as Max, a slick con man who keeps his true self entirely guarded as he meticulously teaches the tricks of his trade. John Lithgow is underutilized as Tom’s disapproving hedge fund billionaire father Richard, but he still delivers what has become his signature mix of charm and menace in his all too brief screen time. Julianne Moore seems to be reveling in her chance to play a manipulative temptress as Richard’s new wife Madeline.

One of the most satisfying pieces of any fair play mystery is the finale, wherein the placement of all the clues that were in plain sight the whole time is revealed. The stacking structure of Sharper allows director Benjamin Caron and writers Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka to go through that process several times, showing how the schemers learned and practiced just the right things to say to make themselves irresistible to their victims. It’s also a mechanic that demonstrates the range of the actors, particularly for newcomer Middleton who shows a tender vulnerability with Smith that provides a remarkable contrast to the fierceness she brings to Sandra’s scenes with Max.

Sharper pretentiously opens with footage of a Rolex being put together, a symbol of the trappings of wealth the con artists use as bait that’s also meant to present its plots as precisely engineered. But Caron’s work proves to be more of a neo-noir knock-off and the machinery stalls in Sharper’s final act; characters who live by their wits suddenly become shockingly gullible and lose their ability to improvise a way out of their predicaments.

As Max repeatedly states, "You can’t cheat an honest man," but it does seem like it should be a bit harder to con a con artist, especially since most of their failings come down to the moralizing trope of bad guys constantly betraying each other. Sharper would be a much better film if it embraced ambiguity rather than feeling like a product of the Hollywood morality code.

Even so, Sharper is a deeply stylish work to look at. It’s filled with the same type of long establishing shots Caron used to great effect on his episodes of Star Wars: Andor. Here, they’re primarily focused on New York’s tunnels and the views from the tops of skyscrapers, a visual representation of the divisions between the criminals on the ground and the marks at the top, and accompanied by a moody, synth-heavy soundtrack from frequent Darren Aranofsky collaborator Clint Mansell.

But looking any deeper than that reveals the trick. When coaching his new protege, Max teaches Sandra how to be vague enough with all her answers that she gives the impression of being a polished scholar even though her actual knowledge is limited to a shallow pool of memorized quotes and references. It’s a good metaphor for Sharper itself: an overly slick film whose story doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny.