Like our friend Mr. Hartnett (see Hollywood Homicide), Burns has been thrust at the movie-going public by being teamed in buddy movies with more established stars like Robert de Niro in 15 Minutes.

Here he's the lead with Jake Vig, a smooth, but small-time grifter, who specialises in cons that scare people into walking away from their money. He gets in hot water when he swipes $150,000 from the courier of a Mr. Big figure called Mr. King (hmm) played by Dustin Hoffman.

This is the preserve of David Mamet: con men, power relations and specifically how men interact with other men. The director, James Foley, helmed the feature version of Mamet's best play about men bouncing off each other with Glengarry Glen Ross in 1992. Foley brings all the elements together slickly, but this is a film without a beating heart and thus a character to root for. All the complicated con-plot-twists in the world don't make your care for Burns' smug git. The script by Doug Jung shows us how clever our protagonist, and by extension, our screenwriter, is, but it never fully involves us.

It's a shame, as they've loaded the idiosyncrasies onto Hoffman's kingpin character who's a self-medicating sufferer of Attention Deficit Disorder and rather ambiguous sexually, while the rest of the cast are solid performers with Rachel Weisz as a femme fatale pickpocket, Andy Garcia as a grungy Fed and Luis Guzman as a dirty cop.

Confidence is released on August 22^nd.

Cert.: 15PG
Check out the official website at www.confidencethemovie.com