It doesn't help that Burns's character is pitched right at the young men in the audience. The script compensates too hard by making the kingpin, played by Dustin Hoffman, into a whackjob: he runs a nightclub with porno-go-go dancers whom he instructs to go down on each other "tastefully"; is eerily intuitive and openly, inappropriately sexual, with men and women; and has attention deficit disorder, so he talks talks talks, everything spilling out; and all of it with a hovering sense of retributive violence. It's a funky creampuff of a role for Hoffman, who chews and chews and chews it. He shows an amazing command of gesture--he can shape scenes just by changing the volume of his voice. Whatever is cheesy in the attempt to make him creepy is more than made up for by Hoffman's late-career vitality. Actually, Hoffman's vitality is so nearly comic that the menace is impaired, but I didn't care, he was too entertaining to watch.

What hurts Burns isn't so much that Hoffman outacts him as that his character recoils from the crime boss's freakiness. There's a deep sense in which Burns is only comfortable appearing "normal," even when he's playing a conman, who by almost any real-world standards would count as some kind of sociopath. You sense that Burns wants young men to identify with him; cautious blandness, however, is not the most reliable way to achieve that in a movie. (He and Ben Affleck could star as twins in a movie nobody would want to see.)

American male movie star's personae have often fallen outside of sexual bounds. There's something recessive about Cary Grant, Montgomery Clift, Warren Beatty, John Travolta, and George Clooney, and something dominant, even to the point of threatening rape, about Clark Gable and at times Marlon Brando. Even square, respectable Spencer Tracy had a visible sexual hold over Katharine Hepburn--he sexualized her in a way that Grant, a more congenial co-star for her, never could, and she does the same for him just by staring at him with flush-faced adoration. Robert Mitchum could be both passive and overpowering.

Burns is more inert than recessive in the way that beckons to the audience. But he's not sexually imposing, either. He's more what you could call "ready when duty calls." In Confidence he both comes on to the girl and spends much of the movie pushing her away, but not with the anger and cynicism of Humphrey Bogart that explain the resistance (and allow the movie to turn it around in the last act). Burns is also fairly humorless, even in the nutty bits when he gets superstitious about redheads and birds, or at any rate he fails to get laughs (Newman's specialty in both his criminal roles opposite that rugged mannequin Redford). I could stare at Burns for hours (a nude scene would have been a real bonus), I just don't enjoy watching him that much. He's self-protecting to the point of dullness at the center of a fast-moving, tricky, amoral suspense movie.