Former health care software developer Ian Niles began his film career in such teeny roles as “Repeat Offender,” “First Officer” and “Guy.” Lately, he’s been developing his own string of low-budget comedies, directing and producing as well as starring as a dim, wide-eyed opportunist forever devising a new scam that invariably blows up disastrously in his face.
The newest, “Con Job,” follows his 2022 “Lie Hard” and his 2018 series attempt, “Millenniums,” which has apparently been recut into a feature, “3 Schmucks.”
In “Con Job” he plays a guy with a plan to lure an old friend back from abroad, drug him, and get him to sign over the rights to an inherited house to his brother. Then Niles’ character, Chris, and the scheming brother Angus (Menuhin Hart) could split the money.
Unforced errors abound — they tell the friend Tim (Dean Edwards) that Chris is getting married, but there’s no bride in sight. They get a roided-up trainer (an over the top Aaron Berg) to notarize, but he turns out to be his own big problem. Then there’s a problem with the big food delivery.
There’s a bit of a shaggy dog story feel to the proceedings which kind of patches the continuous bro-culture banter, in which every other word is dude or the F word.
Niles has a knack of surrounding himself with funny and fast comedians, so the give and take has a rhythm that makes it pop even when the plot takes an odd turn.
One thing about bro-comedies is that they don’t know at all what to do about women. The only ones who briefly appear here (Julia Claire Schweitzer and Mila Besson among them) are shrews, seductresses or schemers themselves (then again, they have to put up with these guys). Crystal Ward is pretty convincing as a cop who keeps responding to the house.
The difference between live action comedy and cartoons, of course, is that one doesn’t quite see the bodies piling up in animation. Wile E. Coyote may explode in one scene and comes right back intact in the next. Here, the mortality and body disposal begins to work at odds with the comedy.
I’m surprised I liked “Con Job” as much as I did. It’s probably because Niles knows what he wants to deliver and mostly succeeds without a lot of loftier ambitions. If it’s a streaming option one afternoon, there could be worse ways to kill time. And if he continues to make movies in which a gang of guys continue to amusingly stumble on their way toward a questionable goal, he could accidentally create a low-key franchise along the lines of the Bowery Boys in the ‘40s.
“Con Job” is available to rent on Amazon Prime.