Caper thriller about a hapless ex-convict who passes himself off as his knifed cellmate to his cellmate's voluptuous pen pal, and in the result gets caught up in a Christmas Eve casino heist. It offers the somewhat unnatural and unsettling spectacle of an old dog trying to learn new tricks. The old dog would be veteran filmmaker John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May), trying to prove that he can match the Tarantino generation quirk for quirk: cockroaches in the prison jello, a thug with his nose in Business Week, robbers in Santa suits, etc. His old tricks -- diagonalist compositions slicing into screen space along lines of sharply receding perspective -- could qualify in the present environment as a Distinctive Personal Style, but this is unavailing in a twists-for-twists'-sake plot that demands periodic and prolonged idiocy on the part of more than one character: any soupçon of surprise must give way to exasperation. (If the hero's identity is in question, why not just phone up the prison and inquire as to the fate of the cellmate?) The callow shallowness of Ben Affleck only points up the frivolity of the endeavor. With Charlize Theron and Gary Sinise. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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