By Kirk Honeycutt 2 hours, 51 minutes ago
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) -
"Deception" will deceive
very few viewers as an all-too-obvious setup leads to a
foregone conclusion featuring forgettable characters. When the
best thing about a movie is its cinematography and art
direction, you know you're in trouble.
Why Hugh Jackman was so excited by Mark Bomback's script to
star and produce the film is as big a mystery as why such
talents-on-a-roll as Ewan McGregor and Michelle Williams joined
the cast. The Fox film opens Friday; box office will be tame.
The background to this movie about a woman's disappearance
and a multimillion-dollar heist is an anonymous sex club for
upper-crust Manhattanites, so Fox might lure some adults,
especially males, hoping for hot action. But even the sex
scenes are too perfunctory to turn up the heat.
McGregor plays a dull corporate auditor with seemingly no
personal life, family or friends. In other words, a sitting
duck for Jackman's predatory attorney, whose playboy lifestyle
seduces the guileless accountant. Jackman then introduces him
to "The List," mobile phone numbers of similar high-powered
workaholics who hook up for hotel sex where bodily fluid but no
names are exchanged.
These one-night adventures in "intimacy without intricacy,"
as one date puts it, have a certain softcore giddiness for
viewers, especially when Natasha Henstridge and Charlotte
Rampling turn up. McGregor falls for a one-nighter, a fragile
beauty (Williams) he only knows as S. Then he is knocked out,
she is abducted and an unlikely thriller takes hold.
Every plot turn reeks of implausibility, but least
convincing of all are the characters, all extreme cases with
little to attract audience sympathy. Could anyone be as naive
as McGregor's mousy, bespectacled shut-in? Is any villain's
ulterior motives so transparent as Jackman's? And has any
director, even a first-timer like commercial filmmaker Marcel
Langenegger, ever telegraphed so many punches?
Rather than paying attention to the lame melodrama, one
instead thrills to the sleekness of Dante Spinotti's lighting
and the inherent drama in Patrizia von Brandenstein's
white-on-black and black-on-white color scheme.
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
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