Movie Brief: 'Deception'
Shot by Dante Spinotti, the extravagantly talented cinematographer of "The Insider" and "L.A. Confidential," the new thriller "Deception" frames the highly photogenic visages of stars Hugh Jackman, Ewan McGregor, and Michelle Williams in sterile, midtown corridors of power offices, boutique hotel rooms, and a Chinatown so ludicrously redecorated that it might as well be in a spaceship orbiting the earth.
The film's conceit — namely, that super-rich, super-attractive, super-busy careerists conduct an anonymous sex club via cell phone hookups — is at first intriguing. So is the boy-meets-boy sexual subtext of supposed attorney Wyatt Bose's (Mr. Jackman) nonsexual pickup of mousy, socially suffocated accountant Jonathan McQuarry (Mr. McGregor). But as a thin and familiar-smelling plot stew involving kidnapping, murder threats and, finally, actual murders comes to a lukewarm simmer, the idea that successful white-collar types (portrayed by Natasha Henstridge and Charlotte Rampling, among others) wouldn't be able to balance work and love by non-digital means starts to seem a little insulting.
More fatal for the audience than for the characters, however, is that all the phoning, texting, faxing, web-surfing, and digital photo-taking on display in "Deception" climaxes in a truly idiotic latter-day attempt at suspense involving Jonathan's skillful manipulation of stacks of figures, password prompts, and download pop-ups on a PC. Call me old-fashioned, but I'll take, "drop your gun or the girl dies!" over "manually consolidate all balances into a fund wire" any day or decade.
In some parallel filmmaking universe, where high-concept thrillers of this type don't start tripping over their own plot strands almost immediately, "Deception" might have been an interesting movie. Ultimately, the only intrigue pulling one into the film is the question of how much money it took for all the evident talent on-screen and behind it to convince themselves that "Deception" was a worthy undertaking for anyone involved.
