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The same can be said about the new caper movie "Confidence." Everyone knows his part, including the audience, whose job it is to enjoy all the tasty twists and turns. The picture ends up chasing its own tail, with a final con that's both too obvious and too abstruse. Still, a lot of good stuff gets done before that happens.

Jake and his gang have pulled one of their more reliable scams and netted $150,000. However, their victim turns out to be a mob accountant, and the money belongs to a racketeer so powerful and uncrossable, he's known as the King (Dustin Hoffman).

Instead of taking the money and disappearing, Jake walks into the lion's den. He goes to see the King at his spectacularly gaudy/seedy nightclub, apologizes for his ignorance and offers to pay him back, with interest. He'll pull an even bigger scam -- and the King can choose the mark.

The King chooses a well-to-do banker (Robert Forster) with underworld connections. Jake gathers his usual suspects -- shills Paul Giamatti and Brian Van Holt and corrupt cops Donal Logue and Luis Guzman -- adds a sexy pickpocket (Rachel Weisz) and gets to work. All the while, he's being watched by the King's enforcer (Franky G) and tailed by a dogged FBI agent (Andy Garcia).

Director James Foley has fluctuated from great movies like "Glengarry Glen Ross" to bona fide bombs like Madonna's "Who's That Girl?" "Confidence" leans to the "Glengarry" side, though the patchwork ending takes away some of what's gone before.

Still, what's gone before is pretty cool. There's a first-act scam that's as nifty as anything David Mamet has ever done. And a beautiful little scamlet in which Burns grifts some diamond earrings for Weisz.

"Confidence" has a lot of the ensemble ease you find in a Mamet film. The actors playing Burns' gang have a character-guy comfort they've honed in dozens of movies. Weisz clearly enjoys being a smart, crooked dame, while Garcia, looking more like Harry Dean Stanton than himself, gleefully crawls into his character's tarnished world-weariness.

Burns, who's usually been more of a handsome, likable presence than a real actor (even in his own movies), has never been so engaged and, well, confident. He gets how Jake's cockiness is both his ace in the hole and his Achilles' heel. This is a guy who wears Armani and a Rolex, not because he feels he's earned them, but because he knows it goes with the presentation. He's slick, so slick that he even cons himself.

But Burns can't con Hoffman out of a scene. The King is Ratso Rizzo if he'd survived the bus trip to Miami and gotten lucky in the lottery. The actor blows into the movie in full mega-sleaze mode. Twitchy, caustic, suspicious, he's a rabid little weasel with big teeth, so sordid you can smell him.

Stylishly directed and smartly acted, "Confidence" may lack the deep-down soul that makes a movie like "House of Games" glitter. But it's a clever enough film that offers Burns a chance to test his acting muscles and Hoffman a chance to flex his.