Starring: Nicolas Cage, Alison Lohman, Sam Rockwell

Matchstick Men is an old con. It's been worked before, so many times, that it's fairly obvious just how it's trying to beguile and trick you. The magic of this nifty, funny comedy is that director Ridley Scott and Co. manage to make the artifice so entertaining, and so well-wrought, that even though you're ahead of the characters, you understand why they are being hopelessly gulled.

Nicolas Cage plays Roy, a con artist (as he corrects anyone who utters "con man") who has an obsessive/compulsive nature. When he loses his illegal medication down the disposal one day, and finds his quack doctor has moved his practice, he quickly disintegrates. He scrubs every surface in his already immaculate house and starts to endanger a huge score on a sleazy businessman that has been set up by his amoral partner, Frank (Sam Rockwell). Frank sends Roy to a reputable psychiatrist who agrees to write a prescription for Roy, but only if Roy agrees to treatment. In his therapy session, Roy talks about his ruined life and his ex-wife, who was pregnant when they separated. After some prodding Roy looks up that child and finds her name is Angela (Alison Lohman, more on her later). Angela barges into Roy's life and rifles through his carefully constructed existence like he was refrigerator full of junk-food. She also starts to talk Roy into teaching her the family business by participating in cons, and Roy realizes that he enjoys being a father.

Scott's direction is, as always, compulsively watchable; one almost begrudges him the fact that he hasn't done something this small, or in this vein, before. His timing is watch-tight, perhaps wound even a little too much, giving some of this material a rather robotic feel. But he's hired some very talented and smart people in the lead roles. Cage is back in frenetic mode, but it's in a context where it makes sense. Lohman, who really should have seen some more recognition for her fine performance in White Oleander, is an accomplished young actress who seems like the babysitter you suspect of filching from your liquor cabinet. She's both too young to be alluring and too much of an old soul not to know what she's doing. If what Lohman's doing is all an accident, it's a pleasant one.

There is also a nice balance between the comedic elements and the darker tones. When Angela and Roy are getting accustomed to one another, there is a strain of believability to the father-daughter relationship. There are also certain echoes to Paper Moon, including the guilt the characters experience when they dupe a customer, mostly the elderly or vulnerable, out of greed or a desire for something for nothing.

Only those who've never seen a con movie in their life will miss the mile markers leading up to the Big Con, but it's irrelevant by that point. Scott has allowed enough investment in the care and welfare of these characters that the larger question that looms is how he's going to make everything all right with you. Let's leave it that he does.