Plenty of examples from the world of cinema prove that there’s something truly primal about the satisfaction of witnessing a confidence trickster at work and rooting for them to get away with their spoils. Dulquer Salmaan rode that high to much acclaim a couple of years ago, and very few films have surpassed the recall value of Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can. There’s tremendous scope for storytelling left in the whole ‘desperate victim of situation turns towards trickery’ trope, so much so that even the prospect of watching Con City, starring Arjun Das and Anna Ben, felt exciting.

And much of the setting of this Harish Durairaj-directed Tamil film brims with the potential to become a fun entertainer about an unlikely gang of con artists, until the writing begins to teeter away from that promise. Con City is the latest addition to the long list of Tamil mid-budget flicks that rely too heavily on an interesting one-liner to squander away character depth and ingenuity.

The fault in the mechanics of the film becomes all the more apparent by the end of the first half — the film begins to feel like a try-hard endeavour that obsessively revels in the peculiarity of its own ideas, though the pay-off isn’t all there. The high-speed mocobot shots, slow-motion walks, parallel cuts, and grand reveals should have all worked, if not for the contrivance and superficial writing. Saravanan (Arjun at his best), Mithra (Anna), her differently abled son Jeeva (Agilan), Jackie (Yogi Babu), and Jackie’s mother Janaki (Vadivukkarasi) live as a family that runs a hotel in Mulki, Karnataka — except they are not really a family, but a group of convicts on the run from Chennai. We learn that Saravanan’s fraud at the EB office where he worked, Mithra’s gamble with her fake rental management company, and Jackie and Janaki’s endeavour to use a trust as a front for circulating money all went kaboom.

Much of the first half follows these individual scams and the rollercoaster of emotions the leads went through. Each of them had suffered from a lack of means to lead a proper life, which pushed them into this life of crime. The inability to pay his home loan — and the pressure from the parents of his upper-middle-class girlfriend — pushes Saravanan over the edge. For Mithra, it is the inability to rent a house in the city. However, writer-director Harish struggles to portray the leads as both victims of their perilous situations and street-smart individuals who already seem to have the knack and know-how of con artistry. With Saravanan, at least, we see the jitters of embracing the other side, but we can’t say the same for others.

Setting off the conflict in the story is an ex-cop named Kalyana Sundaram, who kidnaps Jeeva from his school. Now, before that, how did the family manage it all for seven long years in Mulki? Strangely, the interpersonal dynamics in this found family have hardly changed, except with the child, in these seven years. Post intermission, the film turns quite messy when this gang of convicts is forced to scheme one final scam — yours truly facepalmed the innumerable times when Saravanan’s bafflingly handy mimicry skills come to save the day (convenience apart, it takes conviction to cast this idea on an actor known for his base-heavy baritone voice). There’s nothing truly ‘brilliant’ about these mini-scams that make up the bigger scam, and the film doesn’t have the wit to turn it all into a comedy on amateur con artists who somehow manage to push through.

After a point, when the convenient turns pile up one after the other, and the whole act is repeatedly elevated with slow-motion amp-ups, you can’t help but feel indifference towards the characters. The dry humour saves the film in many places, but the writing keeps making us want to be saved from it. Of course, some ideas worked well in the film’s favour — like not revealing too much about whatever happened between Mithra and Jeeva’s biological father.

But overall, Con City only feels like watching a worn-out magician energetically perform a long-debunked magic trick.

Con City is currently running in theatres