Product Description

Featuring great performances by an all-star cast, The Prime Gig is a moody and suspenseful thriller that will keep you guessing until the very end. With greed, sex and betrayal at its core, this story about the scam of a lifetime exposes the evil that people and money can do.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40532 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2002-02-12
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 98 minutes

Features

• Featuring great performances by an all-star cast, The Prime Gig is a moody and suspenseful thriller that will keep you guessing until the very end. With greed, sex and betrayal at its core, this story about the scam of a lifetime exposes the evil that people and money can do.Running Time: 98 min. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: R Age: 794043547522 UPC: 7940435

Amazon.com
Vince Vaughn stars in this story of high-pressure boiler room telemarketing scams. Vaughn plays Pendelton "Penny" Wise (get it?), a small-time operator who's looking for a bigger score. He takes a "prime gig" with Kelly Grant (Ed Harris), a high-stakes player with a shady gold mine to sell. Prime Gig sets up an unusual tension: you want to root for Penny even though you know he may be bilking people out of their life savings and is most definitely a sleazebag. Harris does well, making what could have been a typical Gordon Gekko knockoff character a little more internalized and interesting, and Julia Ormond does a fine job of fleshing out a character who very well may have been named "Romantic Interest." Vaughn uses his onscreen persona well here--he deftly maintains the hero-scumball balance, never quite letting go of either. Prime Gig is not a perfectly realized movie, but a compelling watch nonetheless. --Ali Davis

Customer Reviews

Good stuff
The Prime Gig, directed by Gregory Mosher and written by Bill Wheeler, is good stuff. A sort of Mamet-esque tale of telemarketing and betrayal. Vince Vaughn and Julia Ormond do very good work together. Ed Harris, a favorite of mine, is not up to his usual standard here ... but is still delivers an acceptable performance.

Overall, the film works. It's quirky and suspenseful simultaneously, and although the plot seems familiar at first, Wheeler takes it in unexpected directions. Mosher's direction is also good, without pompously drawing attention to itself. A well-made film.

Earns the rite to find itself in Walmart's bargain film bin.
I almost cared about this movie. Almost. I mean, you can't go wrong with Vince Vaughn and Ed Harris, right?

Wrong.

The Prime Gig offers slices of entertainment that keep you modestly plugged into the movie, but ultimately, those slices are not enough to suffice. Characters come and go without us caring, and the main characters look as bored as we do. Vaughn plays a conman who goes to work for a master con-artist and ultimately meets his match. There's some attempts to make us care along the way, and some dialogue that tries to assert itself, but at the end of the day, we still don't care and strike 'The Prime Gig' from the first cut at the "Could Have Been a Cool Movie" tryouts.

This Con's on You
There are certainly worse ways to spend 93 minutes -- just check out your local multiplex. Shellgames are never boring, and the ensemble cast is great (as they nearly always tend to be, in con movies). But, as others have pointed out, this one has more holes in it than a shower head. Shares in a gold mine? Pur-lease! Where is any telemarketer supposed to find marks dumb enough to buy those? Why would any telemarketer worth his salt waste his time trying? And, given that the Vince Vaughan character makes it quite clear he's only marrying the girl to help her get a green card (and therefore presumably wouldn't have dreamed of putting his money in a joint account and giving her sole signature over it), what bank would be inept enough to let her clean out his account just because she could show she was his wife?