Our Rating: 2.00
Depending on which 20 minutes you watch, “Matchstick Men” is a caper comedy, a father-daughter drama, a morality tale, a thriller, a psychiatric case study or a tale about finding your place in the world. That’s six plots stuffed into a two-hour movie, so it’s no surprise that, when setup time and execution are accounted for, the filmmakers don’t have much running time left over to devote to anything interesting. Of all of the stories, only the father-daughter thread feels human and well-nourished; the rest of the film is predictable at best and savagely manipulative at worst.
In fairness to the filmmakers — including director Ridley Scott and screenwriters Ted and Nicholas Griffin — “Matchstick Men’s” conceit would be a dud no matter how it were executed. The movie takes as its antihero an obsessive-compulsive con man named Roy (Nicolas Cage), who’s united with a daughter (Alison Lohman) he never knew at the same time that he’s planning a big score with his partner in crime (Sam Rockwell, slick). It’s a story that could have been cannibalized from the best bits of other movies: the precocious kid is from “Paper Moon,” the Roy-versus-neuroses battle is from “As Good As It Gets” and the caper elements are mostly Mamet retreads.
In his younger days, Cage’s cachet alone would have made this clutter worth seeing. For a long time, he was getting remarkable mileage out of a unique persona that reconciled Hollywood’s “brute” and “geek” archetypes into a single, coherent entity. But as he’s slid into middle age, he’s disposed of his dangerous side and given one moody, googly-eyed turn after another. Cage’s downward spiral continues in “Matchstick Men:” His Roy is bland, neurotic and emotionally vulnerable. For Cage, it’s a toothless stunt performance.
As Roy’s daughter, Angela, the vibrant Lohman fares much better. She does make an rather immature 14-year-old (in reality, she’s 23), but she’s an engaging presence throughout. Angela’s rapport with Roy is touching and believable, surviving both his quirks and her distaste for them.
Their relationship is one of those Hollywood confections in which a free spirit helps an uptight buffoon learn to feel love and joy again, but the film wisely lets their relationship progress at a patient clip, and that pace gives their story a considerable legitimacy. Unfortunately, the other plotlines are rough and sketchy things that don’t hold up nearly as well, and over time the film dissolves into a cruelly ironic morality tale that jars against the smart good humor of the Roy-Angela scenes. “Matchstick Men” may have been built out of a pile of clichés, but it didn’t have to be a schizoid mess to boot.
This article appears in Sep 10-16, 2003.