Of the movies I plan to review this month, "Sharper" was probably the one I least looked forward to. The trailer implied it was a mess of a film that tried to be smarter than it actually was. And when I saw Sebastian Stan was attached, I immediately had horrible flashbacks to "Monday," the film that soured me on "The Winter Soldier.''
Yet "Sharper" turned out to be an astute narrative with more inventive twists than M. Night Shyamalan could think up in a decade.
Let me rewind. "Sharper" starts out slowly. It looks like a cliche romance. Justice Smith plays Tom, a man in a depressed headspace who runs a bookstore. One day, a woman named Sandra (Briana Middleton) walks into his shop. Tom asks her out, and we're given a standard montage of two people falling in love over a period of a couple weeks.
That part's admittedly dull.
One night, Tom is awakened by a man screaming outside Sandra's apartment door, banging on it. The alleged Ph.D. student explains she has a brother in a bad spot, and she gives him money from time to time.
Fast forward another day or two, and Tom finds Sandra in her apartment distraught. She reveals her brother owes $350,000 to some people who roughed him up. And he has four days to pay. Tom, being the kind and generous soul he is, offers to give her the cash to pay off these loan sharks.
She refuses at first but eventually takes the money and disappears. At this point, Tom realizes something is amiss. That's all the plot I'll can summarize without spoiling how the movie picks up and transcends into an entirely different quality.
From there, "Sharper" reveals that its story is going to be broken into pieces, some in a nonlinear narrative, but not nearly as spaced apart as "Pulp Fiction."
Stan shows up as a character named Max and immediately steals the show as this slick con artist who has you flinching in some scenes and smiling and nodding in others. He's unpredictable, and you can never tell when he's being honest or playing the game. I suppose that makes him perfect for the part.
By no means is Max a good person, but I found myself desperately wanting the movie to show me just how unlikable he was. Because some thieves are charming and easy to cheer for. I love a good thief, people like Lupin the III and Danny Ocean. Others, like Hans Gruber, slide farther on down the scale of good/evil to the point where I enjoy the performance but obviously can't desire their success.
I won't spoil where Max is on that scale, but one of the things I appreciated about "Sharper" is the audience won't know until the very end.
The twists start to really kick into high gear once Madeline (Julianne Moore) is introduced. She's romantically involved with Tom's extraordinarily wealthy father, Richard (John Lithgow). And that rounds out the cast of resourceful characters who play off one another in this web of depravity so well. Not a bad performance in the bunch.
So you've got a brilliant story full of twists and turns, enhanced by these performers who wear their characters perfectly. It makes for an entertaining movie, a real thought piece. As the minutes ticked by, I kept stammering and asking things out loud, "What?!" and "Isn't she supposed to be --?!" My wife, who was sitting in the next room drawing, kept reacting to my flabbergasted noises asking, "What's happening?"
I had to tell Meghan that I couldn't explain it. There were just too many surprises for me to coherently clarify my reactions.
Combine all that with moody cinematography from Charlotte Bruus Christensen, and I'm left with no choice but to admit I was entirely wrong about "Sharper." Once again, I had to eat my words, something that continues to be a steady part of my diet.
"Sharper" is in theaters and Apple TV+ on Feb. 17.