Finder's Fee (2001)

Sorry, this movie sucks

Best movie ever!

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Be advised - this whole review is about the twist at the end of the film so if you don't want to read a spoiler, stop now.I think the end is fair enough. James Earl Jones, (the impostor Avery), is a colleague or relation of the real Avery, not the guy Victor. The impostor has stumbled across the phone message, knows that Avery plays those numbers every week, impersonates the guy, gets the loot and is going to run off with it. Victor and the real Avery have been conned. Victor has picked up the message second, and so the real Avery appears, too late.Now these days there would be a 60 second montage explaining all this at the end, but the director decided we should figure it out for ourselves.Nice 1 Riddler.

A movie set almost completely in a New York apartment. Some younger and some older people are having a party, in a twisty plot over a mystery and many lies. That was Rope (1948), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.Now back to Finder's Fee. While not every twist and turn had equal plausibility, I enjoyed the suspense and suspicions coming from all sides. Interesting actors, nicely quick pace. And then..(Spoilers ahead) .. the final plot twist shocked me, and made me feel very frustrated. How can a scene of some 20 seconds ruin 90 minutes of well-done movie? Instead of the "Who done it?" question of many other movies, I started to rack my brain with "How could they do it?"A loses his wallet with the 6m ticket. B finds it, leaves a recorded message for C. Then D appears, claims to be A and seems to know a lot but shows no credentials, gets the wallet, but with not the right ticket... In the end, D leaves with the right one, and shortly later A appears and wants his wallet.My only theory is that D and A both heard the recorded message, which gave B's full address. But did both know the ticket was winning? Somehow, I'm still puzzled... I miss a closure that normally THE END should bring.

I was looking through the On Demand on my digital cable and found this and it seemed interesting. I thought it may be very contrived and formulaic but interesting, and what the hell-I was bored. I was drawn into it instantly and cringed as it became more and more intense. I almost just wanted to turn it off and just say to myself-- he got the ticket and everything worked out. As he(Tepper) kept hiding his ticket and sympathy went back and forth between Avery and everyone else I wasn't sure what the good guy was.I started to realize there weren't any good guys and liked it more because it was more like real life than many movies out today. THe twist ending at the end was great and the acting was superb. It was no Big Kahuna or Glengarry Glen Ross like someone else mentioned, but it was good for what it was. I look forward to see what else Jeff Probst has up his sleeve. It was enjoyable-- that is what the critics need to remember-- if it keeps you watching until the end to see what happens it did its job.

Finder's Fee has an exceedingly decent premise at its heart, but the writer (and we know who HE is) doesn't have the skill to pull it off; there are plotholes and contrivances galore, the stupidest one being the way the cops show up to 'seal off' the building - we're never actually given a reason why this happens, just some odd line from Forster about someone named "Raymond getting stuck" somewhere. I truly have no clue who "Raymond" is. This horrendously bad plot device could have been easily explained by writing in something about how, say, they were looking for someone who had supposedly escaped from custody into the building. I was thinking at one point that the cops (if indeed they WERE cops) were in on it with James Earl Jones' character (to keep him in the building so he could get the lottery ticket back), but that doesn't really hold water because near the end --POSSIBLE SPOILER -- when Tepper gives Forster's character the ticket, Forster would have known it wasn't the right ticket (he would have KNOWN the winning 3 numbers from James Earl Jones' character). So he would have come back for the RIGHT ticket after checking it, blah blah blah. -- END OF POSSIBLE SPOILERI hate when movies do this to you, when a film is just not well-written enough to truly hold up but yet you're sucked in because it's written just well enough to keep your attention. This could have been a really decent movie if the writer had put some genuine thought into it. Three words: details, details, details.