Spoilers herein.
Scam films have always been metaperformances: stories about characters who present a different story to other characters. It is a twist on the detective genre where you struggle with the writer for the future of the story. Here, there is no struggle - it is foreordained that the con artist will win. The fun is supposed to be the big surprise at the end.
We all expect the most unattractive guy to get screwed by the most suave, and that's what happens here with this mechanical plot. Yes, you know that the original scam was a setup to get to the King. Yes, we know the tagalong thug is the killer. Yes, we know that everyone will get fleeced, and the guy and girl will end in a fade-out kiss. It is too predictable. Check out `Nine Queens' for something along these lines that follows almost exactly the same template but is much more fun.
Or, you could break the template and have a real surprise ending, with a really sexy girl (rather than the tepid Weisz) and a truly suave guy as in `The Good Thief' which is vastly superior to this tired old business. An example of how tired: he meets the girl when she picks his pocket, then they have an exchange of wallets when they next meet.
I mention `Good Thief' because of how it used the camera. It takes more than just jogging the thing around to make for an enquiring eye. `Thief' knows what it is doing and `Con' doesn't. So it has a fake cinematic stylishness.
The final insult: instead of working on clever, multidimensional self-reference like `Thief,' it repeatedly is blunt with voice-overs telling you: `the con is a performance.' Self-reference for dummies like Lupis. That makes it a Play about a Play about a Play, and none of them done well. Oh, and it has Hoffmans excess which I suppose is better than Pacinos.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 4: Has some interesting elements.
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