Con Job

Rating: 7/10

Director: Ian Niles

Writers: Guy Harry and Ian Niles

Style: Comedy

Time: 1 hour, 33 minutes

Review by Mike Szymanski

Let these two friends, Chris and Angus, take you on a strange journey where they try to con just about everyone they know, and things get scary. And there are bodies.

You will like not like a single person in this film, I should point that flat out, but it doesn’t mean the wacky, harsh, unpredictable journey that the movie goes on isn’t enjoyable. And you’ll laugh, if you’ve got a twisted wit.

Chris is played by the wide-eyed Ian Niles who looks like a Harry Potter type of guy who is always over-excitable. (You must realize this is the film he co-wrote and directs, too, so he’s all in). Chris’s best friend is Angus played by Menuhin Hart, who hands in an understated role as the straight-man to Chris’s insanity.

The two friends are completely broke, and Angus has an estranged brother Tim (played by Dean Edwards), who has run off to Thailand. They try to get Tim to sign away his rights to their family house so the other two can make an incredible deal with a developer.

So, to get Tim back into the country, Chris devises a fake wedding and asks Tim to be the Best Man, so he has to come back home. The two brothers are nervous coming together again, but quickly put away their issues.

Except, Tim still doesn’t want to sell the house. So, the two friends call an another guy who is supposed to look like Tim, and they could get a notary to justify the signature.

In the meantime, they find a really crazy corrupt notary named Jordan played by Aaron Berg. Jordan is nuts, and also Chris’s personal trainer when he is not pushing all kinds of health products.

For example, Jordan boasts about taking Goat Heem, which the others thing is goat semen. They are all excited about going to a swanky nice steakhouse called Richards, but of course they never get there.

They do order in from Richards and in a strange divergent plot twist that goes nowhere, the female delivery person is a psycho girl who Chris ends up boffing in her car. Then, he pays and goes inside and the bags are filled with trash, no food, and a dead rat. The delivery girl psycho is played intensely by Julia Claire Schweitzer.

Jordan has a mishap, and they call in Jeff, a henchman of Chris’s bookie, to impersonate Tim. Jeff is supposed to be Tim, but often doesn’t get his role, and keeps wanting to be called Jeff, and doesn’t look like him at all. But, when Angus calls him “stupid” because he’s not playing his role correctly, then he turns into Evil Jeff, a part of him that he has suppressed.

But Evil Jeff’s got a gun. Things get really, really bad. A neighbor, Mrs. Monroe, comes over to notarize the house sale while the real Tim has overdosed in the next room.

Mrs. Monroe becomes suspicious when Jeff doesn’t know his birthday or address on his ID, and she asks him specific questions. “I’ve been to Thailand, what part do you live?”

He answers “Downtown Thailand.” Evil Jeff gets even more evil when Mrs. Monroe refuses to sign the papers.

And the story tumbles to unpredictable conclusions. The final conclusion may be irritating and incomplete to some, but it ends on a song that sounds like it’s sung from the character.

Niles completed a similar triple whammy of acting and directing “Lie Hard” where he plays an equally loser of a person who borrows $4 million to buy a house to impress the wealthy family of his girlfriend.

After acting for 10 years in short films and low budget movies, he started producing to help dozens of films get made.

This movie was shot all around Los Angeles and is “a true labor of love.

“Con Job” will be release Oct. 25 after appearing at the Chelsea Film Festival.

###