'Brothers Bloom,' a con movie fails to fool its audience

As caper movies go, "The Brothers Bloom" is way too cute for its own good - highly stylized, uneven, unfocused and a half-dozen cons too many. Director-writer Rian Johnson should know that if he's going to con us, there had better be a payoff.

In spite of this, there is a delightful performance from Rachel Weisz and workmanlike ones from the conning brothers Bloom themselves, Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo. If things had been limited to one plot, or two, it might have all played with some joy and involvement. As it is, it wavers uncertainly from comedy to pathos - violent one moment with explosives and death and merry with humor the next. Eventually it wears us out.

Brody plays the younger and more sincere of the crooked brothers. He falls in love with Penelope (Weisz), a rich heiress, while the brothers are endeavoring to con her.

Mark Ruffalo, a Virginia Beach high school grad who has hit it big in the movies, is the older and more conniving of the brothers. He wants to con her and leave her. Ruffalo is cast against type because his forte has been playing sincere, honest and trustworthy types. It's easy to see how he could con us. He's always dependable but hasn't had that one role that would elevate him to the A list. At 41, he's clearly making the crossover from leading man to character roles - a wise move that could keep him employed in movies for years.

The self-conscious script tosses in a female sidekick named Bang Bang who is largely mute and is played by Rinko Kikuchi from "Babel" (2006) and a noisy villain named Diamond Dog, played by Maximilian Schell. This plays like a comic book, not a "graphic novel."

Johnson tries much too hard to make his movie eccentric. There are Russians firing guns. Mexicans doing something shady and subplots at every stop. The result is that he frustrates his audience when he could have charmed them.

The scene stealer is Oscar winner Weisz ("The Constant Gardener," 2005), who is so winningly naive and lonely that she doesn't care if she's conned or not - just so she's having an exciting time. Penelope, the character she plays, is worth so many millions that she could care less about being robbed. Ditzy to the point of being irresistible, she has spent most of her life learning other people's hobbies - rapping, playing the piano and accordion, gymnastics, etc. Now, she's quite willing to go along for a bit of grifting and thievery of her own. She's tired of living life via a script. (We, too, grow tired of the script she lives by.)

She's hilarious in the scene in which she pulls off the theft of an ancient book on her own, climbing through an air-conditioning duct in full view of the police. She may be an amateur, but we can thoroughly believe that she charms the police, off camera, into letting her go.

You might immediately think of "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," the 1988 film about two crooks trying to con a rich woman, but that was a real comedy, not a marathon race of subplots.

Ruffalo deserves better. Brody's Ichabod Crane imitation grows repetitive, and that leaves Weisz to save the movie. She comes close to doing it, if things just weren't so overdone.

Skip it.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com.