Besides the three main characters reading like the beginning of a bad joke: "A Jew, A Sicilian and a Scot walk into a bar..", this is not a terrible movie.
Connery, Hoffman and Broderick all were mis-cast. Connery just does not look like a con man: He looks like the president. Hmmm. Maybe a bad analogy.
Why not get three people who look somewhat similar, maybe like Nick Nolte, Alec Baldwin and Christian Slater?
So, as I said, this movie is not god-awful. It is rather good, but there are one or two major complaints I have:
Why is Broderick's character (Adam) angry at his father (Hoffman as Vito) after Vito turns himself in to the police.., since Adam was the one who got him involved in the first place?!
Why does Vito apologize to Adam towards the end, when it should have been the other way around?
There is an inconsistency in the plot, too: The judge would have thrown the book at Adam, not his grandfather (Connery as Jessie), once they realized that he was recently a graduate student of molecular biology, and obviously the brains and impetus of the caper.
Jessie was infuriatingly arrogant and persuasive, and I was not sorry to see him go to the slammer. Vito should have gone head-to-head against Jessie, in an attempt to save his son from a life of crime and/or punishment. Now THAT would have been worth watching.
I'm not even going to ask how the Jew, the Sicilian and the Scot became Irish. McMullen? Anyone?