CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Spikeopath Deception is directed by Marcel Langenegger and written by Mark Bomback. It stars Ewen McGregor, Hugh Jackman and Michelle Williams. Music is by Ramin Djawadi and cinematography by Dante Spinotti.Jonathan McQuarry (McGregor) is a timid New York accountant who whilst working late one night meets Wyatt Bose (Jackman). Bose is the complete opposite to McQuarry, he's highly sexed, confident and supremely cool. So when a mix up with the pair's mobile phones introduces McQuarry to an exclusive sex group, he's spun into a world completely alien to him.If you have watched a lot of film noir, both classic era and neo, Deception will come off as irritatingly stale. What we have here is very much a case of the title revealing far too much! You would hope that with the makers going for broke with such a title then they would have the nous to fill out the story with surprises, take us and the principal characters down some twisty streets, not so, sadly. Within ten minutes you catch on to what is happening, the writing so poor as to not cleverly challenge the narrative drive. It could maybe be argued that McQuarry's journey, and how the character evolves, is something of a veer from the noir norm? But it has no dramatic worth and renders the finale as dull (the alternate ending is even worse).It's not a total wash out as such, the cast are engaging in their roles, good actors straining to make a weak screenplay work, while cameos from Natasha Henstridge, Charlotte Rampling and Maggie Q impact to come off as better than novelty value. And then there's Spinotti's (Manhunter, L.A. Confidential, Heat) cinematography, the best character in the play. His nighttime city scapes are electric, his colour lenses beautiful (golds and blues are poetic), his work deserves a better film. But that's about it, leaving us with a shallow noir cover version that's in search of its own identity. For those not familiar with the noir form, then this is just about average enough for a look see. For noir fans, though, it's neither erotic or thrilling and as unadventurous as it gets. 5/10

Robert J. Maxwell This didn't get exceptional reviews but I kind of enjoyed most of it. It was mostly towards the end when the winces of disbelief appeared.It's a suspense story in which naive, dumb, prosperous burgher Ewan McGregor is blackmailed by smiling, psychopathic, murdering Hugh Jackman and sultry but beef-brained Michelle Williams.I don't think I'll give away much of the plot because it's twisted and at the end it explodes into a multitude of flapdoodles.I found the acting to be pretty good. McGregor is entirely believable as the harmless Wall Street. Jackman is strapped into the role of the smiling evildoer and there's not much that he can do with it. Williams is convincing. Lisa Gay Hamilton, an unimpressive physical presence, brings life to the role of the necessary detective. The direction is functional and efficient, without fireworks.However, the plot thins. You have to believe, for instance, that a man and a hooker who have just met are still able to fall so deeply in love that they're willing to kill for one another.You have to believe that a man in a foreign country, without a job or any other source of income, could walk away from twenty million dollars of mob money that no one would miss anyway. I mean, really -- would you?

sxjTheFirst The movie starts off well really really well. Two great (and good looking) actors meeting at work and smoking pot - the implausibility of the scene makes you wonder if this film is going to be full of treats like this. As the plot unfolds you wonder in good but not great scenes you wonder if this is film is going to a pull a Woody Allen off dealing with a subsection of NY society. The you hope it least has a decent statement on sexuality and casual sex or at least "high" society. By the time the thriller part starts you hope at least it makes a decent thriller. However it fails at even this and if you are still interested in the film you finally give all hope of it ever becoming anything other than a promising but poorly directed forgettable film.

nmlal68 I don't recall in recent times having seen a movie that got me as mad as this one. Yes, it's a TERRIBLE movie, but with the particularity of being so dumb, that you could not escape feeling furious. If it were only bad, that would have been bad enough but acceptable, in some cases even respectable. But this one was a nasty joke thrown at your face, a charade, an ugly farce.The beginning is very promising, even spectacular. You sit down, relaxed, with a drink in your hand, and start being pulled into a world of mystery and strange sexual schemes, and you think WOW!... finally something out of the ordinary, something that feels going deep into the dark side. And with excellent actors too. And you keep watching, fully enthusiastic, until you slowly realize that the plot you found so astonishing is after all just some minor side story, not even very important to the REAL plot, and that the REAL plot, a game of stupid uninteresting blackmail and computer burglary, is actually the main dish and you can't believe it. What about the OTHER plot, the good one, the one I was digging? HELP! I WANT IT BACK!What's going on? How can they do something like that? You are shown a deer but are fed the horns? And then it drags on and on into no man's land, everything so boring, so "for the McDonald's family", so full of the typical Hollywood crap, bla, bla, bla...And finally the ending, truly the worst I ever saw. They were even given the rare privilege of minimizing the damage with some twisted final, but no sir, it had to be one of those "mass audience bullshit" endings with a gun (two actually) and the bad guy dying and the good guy living and getting the ravishing girl that was bad but not that bad that turned out good after all.The UTTER DECEPTION! Good to feed the dogs with!