Sucker is a cutesy Australian spin on the travelling shyster or scammer film – The Sting down under – crossed with a fluffy road movie. A sweet-natured screenplay, written by the director, Ben Chessell, and Lawrence Leung, pegs a coming-of-age story to the familiar pairing of an impressionable apprentice and a leery, seen-it-all-before mentor.
From the start it’s clear Chessell and Leung won’t be crediting their audience with a great deal of intelligence, the latter appearing to explain direct to camera the concept of lying. It’s something everybody does, he says, “part of human nature”.
This is a hangover from the script’s origins as Leung’s one-man comedy show, supposedly inspired by real-life experiences. On film his bookend appearances are distracting, the comedian too old to play adolescent and too young (37, but he could pass for twentysomething) to meaningfully assume the role of a wizened sage looking back on his life.
Instead, the actor playing a version of Leung’s younger self is John Luc, a minor YouTube celebrity asked to hold his own opposite his British co-star, Timothy Spall – a task roughly on par with beating an expert magician at a three-card monte routine.
After their son is caught cheating on an exam at an exclusive private school in Melbourne, Lawrence’s appalled parents ship him off to the country to spend time with his uncle (Yang Li). He soon falls under the tutelage of a small-time con man – or “professional liar” – known only as the Professor (Spall).
Spall snorted, wheezed and carried on like a pork chop in his fabulously eccentric portrayal of the painter JMW Turner in last year’s Mr Turner. There are notes of a similar delicious smugness here, in scenes such as a silly but fun monologue in a news agency where the plump rascal jabbers on about desire, comparing tabloid magazines to his own take on giving people what they think they want.
Lawrence meets the Professor when he bowls into a community chess club and, filthy drunk, bets he can play everybody in the room at the same time. Of course, he’s up to something (a scam predictable to anyone who’s seen a con artist movie before) and Lawrence likes the cut of his jib. Also, the look of his daughter, Sarah (Lily Sullivan).
The trio go cross country, pocketing coin through various small-town cons in the leadup to a final high-stakes fleece at a Melbourne casino. The film regularly tells us not to take Lawrence seriously – the “newbie scammer making a mistake” routine is repeated at least one too many times – before it flicks a switch and attempts to pass him off, hey presto, as a formidable shark (in a gaudy polka-dot blazer, no less).
The most provocative con is a honeytrap extortion that has the Professor busting men in hotel rooms for trying to bed his daughter, who he says is underage. The tone of the film is so clean-cut and inoffensive the ruse barely even feels untoward; these scenes could be edited out and spliced into Red Dog. The cinematography of Katie Milwright (who shot episodes of Laid and Please Like Me) is so cleanly graded Sucker looks like the sort of production set in a surf town.
The humour is broad and the jokes are hit and miss, interspersed with some cute cultural gags. Traces of Leung’s inoffensive style – more Hamish and Andy than Louie CK – can be felt throughout. Sucker is the latest entry in an emerging genre of Chinese-Australian stories, typically dramas: Floating Life (1996), The Homesong Stories (2007) and Mao’s Last Dancer (2009).
Spall is the film’s greatest asset but Luc’s performance is a more harmonious fit tonally. Like the film, he is pleasant, unprepossessing and nothing to write home about.
