Writer-director Rian Johnson’s conman caper definitely favours style over substance.

Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo, as Johnson’s titular scam artists, occupy a timelessly chic storybook world of exotic European locations, Lamborghinis and steam ships, capes, cigar smoke and mute Oriental henchwomen.

The film repeatedly poses the question of who is conning who, as bluffs begin to double, treble, even quadruple.

It’s larky, arch fun, although not quite as charming or clever as it thinks it is.

Ruffalo’s Stephen is the mastermind who plots their schemes, Brody’s Bloom the charmer who draws the “marks” in.

For their grand final coup the duo woo Rachel Weisz’s oddball heiress Penelope into parting with a million bucks to fund the theft of an antique bible in Prague.

But is the theft real, or a chimera? And are Bloom’s misgivings about trifling with Penelope’s affections genuine, or just part of Stephen’s script?

Bloom yearns to escape to a hammock, a bottle and “an unwritten life” in Montenegro. Or does he?

Johnson is clearly as fascinated by the point where storytelling and deception meet as the older, wiser David Mamet.

But, unlike Mamet, he can’t help loading his film with more stylistic and thematic baggage than its thin frame can bear.

This tendency was apparent in his engaging but overly convoluted debut, Brick, and here there are clever-dick references to Dostoyevsky and Melville and countless cinematic in-jokes.

Rinko Kikuchi as Stephen’s slinkily silent, chain-smoking, explosives expert sidekick Bang Bang could, for instance, have stepped out of a Sixties spy spoof.

So could a leering, overacting Maximilian Schell as the brothers’ one-eyed, Fagin-like mentor, Diamond Dog.

For all its pretensions, though, the film’s overall tone is light and airy, as it zips from Berlin to Prague to New Jersey to Russia as if on a grand tour.

Ruffalo swaggers his way through the film, performing inept card tricks, while Brody broods with that elongated face and those mournful eyes.

Weisz arguably has the most fun with her part, although Penelope is more of a collection of quirks and neuroses than a character — an isolated, epileptic, allergic weirdo who juggles chainsaws, makes pinhole cameras out of melons, and gets absurdly turned on by thunderstorms.

None of the roles really has much substance. The film is supposed to get darker but actually just gets flatter as the final con moves into a serious-seeming endgame.

“There are no unwritten lives, just badly written ones,” says Penelope at the finale. Well, quite.

The Brothers Bloom isn’t badly written, but hasn’t got that much going for it beneath its undeniably slick veneer of stylish fun.