Sharper - Review Thread

Sharper is a movie that kind of showed up on AppleTV+ without much fanfare despite having a pretty respectable cast, and there’s probably a reason for that. This movie is basically a personification of the word “mid,” in fact that may be a bit generous. This is a con artist film which pretty closely resembles the Stephen Frears film The Grifters, and it plays out in a handful of segments from the point of view of various characters. In this sense it feels a bit like a throwback to the 90s and early 2000s when playing around with chronology was all the rage, but the tone is a little mellower than what you get out of those movies… maybe too mellow? The film was directed by a guy named Benjamin Caron, who mostly worked in TV before this and I can’t say that the feature film debut from him really makes much of a case for him to work on the big screen as there isn’t a particularly distinct style on display here. The film isn’t bad though, necessarily, in fact I was probably on its side for its first two and a half segments or so and it rarely misfires completely but at a certain point it kind of lost me at a certain point, probably when Julianne Moore entered into it. What’s worse, I found the film’s final triple-cross to be pretty derivative and predictable, and since being “fooled” by such shenanigans is a large part of the appeal of movies like this something like that not working is a pretty big blow. On the positive side, the performances are mostly decent and it usually doesn’t have too many unforgivably off notes, so it’s a movie that probably can pass one’s time well enough but it’s ultimately very forgettable.
*** out of Five