The Truth? Just Another Dumb Hollywood Flick.

Winner of 7 Oscars including Best Picture.
Reuniting of Newman & Redford from “Sundance.”
Soundtrack all over the radio.

Well, let me tell you this: it’s not very good.
I never really liked it that much, but now I like it less.
Truth is, it’s really just another dumb Hollywood movie full of preposterous, made-up nonsense. Fairly well-done, yes. But dumb.

It’s hard for me to like any movie so busy being impressed with itself. It thinks it’s really clever. Sometimes it is, but mostly not. It’s based on the same book that inspired Stephen Cannell to create “The Rockford Files,” a big fat out-of-print how-to book from the 30’s called “The Big Con” that everyone in Hollywoodtown suddenly rediscovered in the 70’s. It thinks it knows its subject well enough to lead you from one unlikely happening to the next, forgetting that some of us actually have a limit to how much we’ll suspend disbelief. I like watching Newman and Redford as much as the next guy: the former’s acting is good, but only some of the latter’s is.

Just a small sampling of the silliness we’re supposed to swallow:

1) The button-operated cheating mechanism on the roulette wheel

2) Kid Twist telling Lonnegan to “Place it on (horse’s name)” as if anyone would really do that

3) Switching a dealt hand of four 3’s for four jacks from a matching deck. Lonnegan would merely have to spread the discards to show the extra jacks and missing 3’s.

4) Most preposterous of all: diner waitress Loretta who is actually a well-known mob boss AND professional killer (but somehow not to anyone else in either Gondorf’s or Hooker’s circle)

And only some of this antipathy is because my pick for that year’s Oscar winner was “The Exorcist,” even though I would not actually see it until 1975.

It’s on Netflix right now if you care to spend two hours and nine minutes to find out that I’m right.