Director Jeremy Paul Kagan
Starring Jackie Gleason, Mac Davis, Teri Garr, Oliver Reed & Karl Malden
Rated PG
Score 2.5/6

Lonnegan is planning to get back at Gondorff and Hooker for bilking him out of half a million. At the same time Gondorff and Hooker are planning their next caper. And their mark is a man named Macalinski, who makes Lonnegan look like a pussycat. Their con is boxing match and Hooker is the fighter whom they have to make look good but Macalinski needs some convincing, and Hooker is a little rusty.

Okay, before we get to far into things, I’ll pause for a second and say that I suppose the reason why Robert Redford and Paul Newman did not appear in this sequel is that they where to busy with their careers. Are there better jokes that I could have made? Probably, I just could not think of one.

A small history lesson from what I have read about The Sting 2 back in 1983 Director Jeremy Paul Kagan claimed “The Sting II is inspired by and is an expansion of the first Sting, rather than a continuation. The principal characters of Fargo Gondorff and Jake Hooker are based on two very famous real-life con men and are totally different from the two characters in the original.”
Going by the references by the characters to the original film this is nothing more then a small piece of Directorial spin. I believe that if the Filmmakers had of given Oliver Reed a different character to play for the villain and left Doyle Lonnegan in the original movie, this could have been an okay movie. The movie does drag on a little in places especially in the second act, but it is not painful to watch. The performances of Oliver Reed, Jackie Gleason and Karl Malden are what makes the movie tolerable to watch. I particularly enjoyed where Gondorff and Macalinski (Gleason and Malden) ended up playing Three Card Monte.
But what ultimately lets The Sting 2 is that as a crime movie set in the late 30’s it lacked the sense of flair that you would expect.