To put it in the most concrete terms possible, this is a tale of industrial espionage. But it would be difficult to continue very long to talk in concrete terms about a plot that revolves around a closely guarded secret known to us only as "the process." It's simply a given that our hero, a mid-level corporate role-player in an unspecified line of business, has come up with some top-secret formula invaluable to his superiors and, naturally, to their nameless competitors in the global market. And he soon finds himself, though he is not soon aware of it, in the middle of a confidence game to separate him from his formula. (The name of the con game is the name of the movie.) This much conforms to Hitchcock's invaluable formula of loosing Mr. Normal from his moorings -- "the process" would be Hitchcock's McGuffin, his pretext -- although writer-director David Mamet cares considerably less about plausible circumstantiation: whose spies? what formula? what for? To Mamet, the game and the gamesmanship are everything, the people little more than pieces on the playing board. In the end, the movie is as contrived and overelaborate and tricksy-for-tricks'-sake as such a mechanical contraption as The Game, or -- as one of the critical blurbs none too flatteringly suggests -- The Usual Suspects. But it stands up better than those others, and many like them, under a close inspection. Mamet plays his game with great dedication, great discipline, great finesse, great cunning, and he inspires a high level of alertness on the part of the spectator. Campbell Scott, Rebecca Pidgeon, Steve Martin, Ricky Jay, Ben Gazzara, Felicity Huffman. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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