Loose remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le Flambeur, loose as ashes (to steal a line from Bing Crosby). The hero looks to be the brainchild of an intellectually precocious adolescent, one who has immersed himself in Raymond Chandler -- although these days it might be Robert Parker or Lawrence Block -- and who at some point has moved up to Camus and Céline and down to Burroughs and Bukowski. A reformed thief if not a reformed gambler or heroin addict, our man is tempted to come in on a Monte Carlo casino heist when his luck finally "bottoms out." Not a heist of the eighty million in the safe, but -- something to appeal to the aesthete in him -- a heist of the Cézannes, Gauguins, Modiglianis, Picassos, etc., owned by the Japanese proprietors. Nick Nolte, with a jumbo frog in his throat, reverberant undertones of mockery and put-on in his delivery, and a studied air of nonchalance, does nothing to dispel the impression of someone who took his boyhood reading a little too much to heart. And writer-director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Mona Lisa, The End of the Affair), filling out the soundtrack with the likes of Leonard Cohen and Serge Gainsbourg as well as a cover version of Sinatra, and jazzing up the image with gear-grinding changes of speed and stop-on-a-dime freeze-frames, is clearly a co-conspirator, more probably the mastermind and omnipotent puppeteer. The movie is so preoccupied with demeanor (little pearls of wisdom: "You know the first thing to learn about gambling? Clothes!" and "It's not about winning, it's about attitude") that it can't be bothered to clarify the details of the caper, which pass before our eyes like the pea in a shell game, facilitated with James Bond-ian gadgetry (a cigarette-lighter-camera as well as a pen-camera, not to be confused with the caméra-stylo of French cinematic theory), a dazzling array of computer graphics, and a torrent of techno-babble in foreign accents. Nutsa Kukhianidze, Tcheky Karyo, Emir Kusturica, Ralph Fiennes. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd