Apple TV+ neo-noir thriller Sharper centers on a circle of power players and would-be moguls scattered across New York City. The film adopts a La Ronde structure in tracing the malice and greed that motivates the con artists. And its sleek, Instagram-inspired look, as well as its ’80s-style score, make the ill-gotten gains shine all the brighter.
Premiering today, Sharper is a perfectly fine movie. But unfortunately, it’s designed to be forgotten the day after it’s been seen.
Sharper review
In a corner of Manhattan, the world’s hottest bookseller searches for something for the world’s hottest customer. She says it’s for her professor, but when it comes time to pay, her card doesn’t work. Smitten, he says she can pay her back later and lets her leave with the book.
True to her word, she comes back later with the money and he takes her to dinner. He’s Tom (played by Justice Smith), a would-be author. She’s Sandra (Briana Middleton), an orphan who loves Jane Eyre and radical feminism. Hearing that, he takes her back to the bookstore and shows her his … first edition of Jane Eyre.
Theirs is a whirlwind courtship, flirtatious and passionate and intimate, all the right things. Then one day, Tom wakes up to the screams of someone banging down the door, trying to talk to Sandra. She says it’s her brother and, though they have an uncomfortable relationship, she says she can’t just cut him out of her life.
One con leads to another
A few nights later, she asks why they never go back to his place? Turns out Tom lives with his dad, and his dad’s new wife, and he gets along with neither of them. The old man is very sick. Better just to steer clear of the whole thing.
Things get tense when Sandra’s brother returns and needs $350,000 to pay off some mobster types. Tom reveals something curious. He’s rich. His dad owns a hedge fund. He’s got the money. He practically insists Sandra take it. Smart guy, inee? She does not return that night to their preordained time and place. When he goes to her apartment later, he finds it empty.
And another
Flashback: Sandra is a kid just out of prison and failing her parole officer Larusso’s (Kerry Flanagan) exam when a handsome stranger named Max (Sebastian Stan) intervenes. Max pays off the cop and then some. The hapless cop talks herself into getting conned for a fake Rolex, and Sandra has a new best friend.
Max takes Sandra back to his penthouse apartment and says he’s going to make something out of her. She blows it night one by getting high, but she promises she’s going to get clean. He teaches her a lot about classic literature (the Cliffs Notes version, anyway) so she will seem convincing as a lit major. And he has her read the paper every day to get a sense of current events so she seems slightly worldly.
Just when they’re starting to get along, he takes her on her first job. She seduces a married guy William (Quincy Dunn-Baker) at a high-end cocktail bar. Just when things are getting hot and heavy, Max breaks into the room, pretending to be an angry ex-lover. They get William to leave the room and steal his stuff.
But wait … there’s more!
Photo: Apple TV+
Flashing back even further: Max is the son of a woman named Madeleine (Julianne Moore) who lately married up to a mogul named Richard Hobbes (John Lithgow). Max has a truly terrible attitude about life, and is a consistent drag and embarrassment to his mom. He’s a former addict, and can’t house himself, so he asks to stay in Richard’s penthouse.
One night after an event, Max has a friend of his named Tipsy (Phillip Johnson Richardson) impersonate a detective to shake down Richard for some money. That’s the last straw for Madeleine. She slaps her son and kicks him out. Richard gives him a piece of parting advice: “If you’re gonna steal, steal a lot.”
Another twist will do
Of course, that too is a con. Madeleine’s not Max’s mom. She’s his lover and partner. She gets Richard to let Max come by his office and apologize. Who should be waiting in Richard’s office but his son … Tom.
Tom wants to open a bookstore. Richard thinks it’s a dumb idea, but he’s going to finance it anyway. He sees the same bad investment idea in Max as he does in Tom, but he wants to marry Madeleine. So he makes Max an offer: $60,000 a month to go away.
Max is tempted but unmoved. If Richard wants to marry Madeleine, he’s gonna need a year’s salary in cash right now. Richard agrees, and Max walks off with a duffel bag full of cash. Of course, nothing’s ever that easy. Madeleine decides she likes Richard. So she sends the police over to Max’s place to arrest him on a bunch of outstanding warrants and keeps her sham marriage and her slice of the pie, sending Max into hiding.
Hey, at least he got to keep the money. But it gave Max an idea about what his next con should be …
Why we love con artist films
Photo: Apple TV+
Con artist movies are a time-honored tradition, going back to the earliest days of cinema. There is simple joy to be found in their character beats; a man walks into a crowded room with nothing and leaves with everything. If well-written and carefully played, that can be the most thrilling thing in the world.
Quick thinking. It’s a tough thing to communicate. You have to be smarter than the characters you’re creating.
Something’s missing here
Sharper’s problem is it only really invents about five or six cons for the cast to embark upon, and they’re all mostly big (stealing the money from Tom) or very, very small (Madeleine taking expensive rings off a jewelry counter and putting them in her purse). The film misses out on the texture of life lived by lies. It’s a big thing to say that Max shouldn’t trust Madeleine. But other than the fact of her con artistry, we don’t see the little dishonesties that someone like this, a serial manipulator, would get up to.
Furthermore, there’s too few characters for there to be this many coincidences and belief-beggaring turns of events. It’s a closed circuit con, which means that ultimately the world of these people is too claustrophobic for this to be very interesting when you factor in all the screenwriter luck they’re given. No one ever calls the police when they have the chance, no one stops trusting anyone when it makes sense to do so, and Tom’s love for Sandra hinges entirely on her being beautiful, and then when she offers him an extremely high risk revenge scenario he just… agrees?
Madeleine not actually disposing of Max and Sandra when they present obstacles to her isn’t the kind of sound investment someone hoping to con someone out of billions of dollars would make. I know the accepted pathology is that all criminals want to get caught, but she must really want to get caught.
Ultimately, Sharper is fine but forgettable
Otherwise, everything else is fine. Moore is great at playing both the conniving schemer and the concerned mother. I haven’t liked her this much in a while. Stan cannot handle the demands of Max the fake addict, but he fares much better as Max the slick huckster. He has a fun little dance sequence to Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry” that I wish director Benjamin Caron had filmed better.
Caron, a TV director (it shows), covers everything with as much personality as he can, but it’s basically for naught. All the pictures are pretty, but there’s no real sense of purpose here. A director got a script and made it into a decent movie. It’s just not anything more than that, and why wouldn’t you try to do more?
★★★☆☆
Watch Sharper on Apple TV+
Sharper premieres today on Apple TV+.
Rated: R
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
