THIS crime thriller is hailed by the Radio Times as "sharp and sassy". It's about as sharp as my half-chewed nails and not half as nail-biting.

John C Reilly gets a lead role as Los Angeles-based con man Richard Gaddis, who enlists Diego Luna's young scam-artist Rodrigo as a potential new partner after witnessing him trying to pull a partially successful scam in a casino.

Gaddis believes Rodrigo has promise and quickly puts him to work on a couple of very unconvincing low-rent scams.

He then lets the Mexican in on a potentially lucrative scheme to deliver a counterfeit banknote to a wealthy guest at the hotel where his sister, Valerie (Maggie Gyllenhaal), is working as concierge.

But the scam has its problems and the over-confident Gaddis is forced to keep improvising and recruiting new collaborators - a complication with comic possibilities.

The plot is a remake of Argentinian film Nine Queens, which was released only four years ago but has been re-fashioned by producers George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh.

But the slow-moving, barely credible plot pales in the face of its predecessors and is merely a simple conjuring trick - and a fairly inept one at that.

CS