Ridley Scott takes time off from the epics of violence he’s been specializing in these days (Hannibal, Gladiator) for this crime comedy about a tic-ridden con man (Nicolas Cage) reunited for the first time with his wayward daughter just as he’s about to pull off a massive swindle. It sounds to us like Paper Moon as rewritten by Charlie Kaufman, which is a promising enough beginning. We’ll cross our fingers about a couple of things, though. When you throw Cage a solidly weird role like this one, he has a tendency to ham the place up something fierce. And we also hope that the story line’s better than what we’ve seen from source novelist Eric Garcia, whose first two books were cute but unoriginal sci-fi mysteries with a kinda dumb premise about a Chandlerian private eye who’s really a (gasp) velociraptor.
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