| Home | Movies A-M | Movies N-Z | News |
Poster (c) Warner Bros.
At first, it’s hard to believe that Matchstick Men is a Ridley Scott film. He’s mainly known for his gruesome films, like Hannibal and Alien. However, for each Black Hawk Down, there’s a Thelma and Louise. Matchstick Men is by no means a violent film, nor hard to watch. In fact, out of all of the movies of 2003 so far, I’ll bet that this movie has more rewatch value than most. What really makes Matchstick Men a realistic piece is the acting, which I will get into later.
Nicolas Cage, in hopefully another Oscar nominated role, plays Roy, a con man (artist, as he would correct you) with obsessive-compulsive disorder. He and his partner Frank (Sam Rockwell) aren’t in the big-time, but still collect decent sums of money. However, he runs out of his pills he needs to control some of his OCD, and his doctor’s moved, so he goes to a psychiatrist (Bruce Altman) in order to get some more. In the course of it, he decides to see if his wife, who was pregnant when they were divorced, has a child. Lo and behold, she does, and 23-going-on-14 Angela (Alison Lohman) is introduced into his life.
Roy, obviously, doesn’t know the first thing about parenting, which doesn’t work well with Angela’s semi-rebellious behavior. Also, to thicken the plot even more, Roy and Frank are about to perform a huge con on someone, and don’t want anyone in their way. Roy doesn’t want Angela to know about his real profession (he tells everyone he’s into antiquing). And then things start to heat up.
Going into Matchstick Men, I was expecting something like Ocean’s Eleven, a light-hearted crime caper (not necessarily a comedy), and that’s what I got. Although it’s not as entertaining nor as confusing as Ocean’s Eleven, they’re both good movies in their own right. Matchstick Men runs too long at about 110 minutes, but I never felt like checking my watch or wanting to leave. I have read a little of the book by Eric Garcia (it didn’t really keep my interest), but not much. Therefore, throughout the movie, I had no idea what was going to happen. At the ending “twist”, I predicted it right before Roy did, so I was happy, not only for myself for being able to guess it, but how Scott made the movie go out, I had no idea.
Cage, unlike Adaptation., deserves whatever awards or nominations he manages to get. Not only did he make me believe that, yes, he was Roy the con man, but he was also Roy the obsessive-compulsive. The only other actor I have seen portray someone with OCD so well is Tony Shalhoub as Adrian Monk on TV’s Monk. The way that he acted was so realistic. However (this is a script complaint), about halfway through or so, he basically lost his OCD. Anyway, Rockwell added another impressive performance, but he didn’t have much to do/work with. Lohman impressed me, very much so. I didn’t expect so much out of her.
This may be considered going off on a tangent, but it makes sense that Robert Zemeckis is an executive producer. He’s a protégé of Steven Speilberg, possibly most famous for his false endings. If the last ten minutes or so had been slashed off, then maybe Matchstick Men could have gotten a higher rating. However, it wasn’t, so the rating is a solid 7/10.
Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, violence, some sexual content and language.
Review Date: September 12, 2003