Gambit (2012)

A remake of the 1966 caper, scripted by the Coen brothers and directed by Michael Hoffman, Gambit arrives with the mild manners of a film that wants only to amuse and largely fails to. Colin Firth plays an art curator plotting to fleece his abusive billionaire employer with a forged Monet, and the machinery of the con grinds along with the dutiful rhythm of a Swiss watch assembled by someone who has lost interest in watches. It is a heist picture, and heist pictures are, by tradition, among the least socially minded of genres. Everyone wants money. Nobody wants to change the world.

The film's cultural consciousness is close to nonexistent, and it seems content there. Cameron Diaz's Texas rodeo queen drives the scheme with a self-directed swagger, though the screenplay treats her as a comedic eccentric, not as any kind of argument about women in a man's game. The cast is white British and American throughout, with a Japanese businessman antagonist dropped in as a plot convenience and no comment made about it. There is a faint pleasure in watching a monstrous collector get taken, which registers as a shrug toward the wealthy instead of a critique of wealth. The Nazi looting that lends the fake Monet its provenance is historical furniture, used for authenticity, not for moral instruction. Race, sexuality, the climate, the body, the mind: none of it is on the agenda.

What remains is a starry, charmless farce that premiered in London, limped into American theaters years later, and earned its 18 percent. It lectures no one. In an era that rewards films for having something to say, this one has nothing to say at all, and says it with Colin Firth in a nice suit.