Sick Product of a Sick System

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

This was a great experience until the balloon popped in a lame ending.A murder mystery that jumps between periods at the drop of a hat as we follow a comedy duo's involvement in the discovery of a body in the bath of their hotel suite.It's very twisty, but entertaining too, so I was happy to keep the cogs whirring in my brain as I tried to figure it out. Sadly the cogs span too fast, and I was way down Mulholland Dr when the director forced me into a U-turn and back to an Agatha Christie style reveal.My problem was I thought I spotted some synchronicity between the victim's age, the time lapse on Firth's decision to write, the victim's would-be age at the time her mother spoke, and the year in which the victim's father and the reporter's father died. Reporter is the victim's sister, and she's in some delusional revenge nightmare! Has to be, especially with the Lynchian through-the-looking-glass moment of Alice on stage. And the title screams Unreliable Narrator. Yes?Nope. I had to ditch that and listen to Madame Poirot explain the plot in every, earnest detail.Most of it was great, some good laughs, but a big fat disappointment.

We have to take a lot for granted when we watch movies. Everyone knows this but there is only so much you can take before the mind clicks off. This happened to me ten minutes in. The premise is daft to the point of risible. A comic duo are presented to the audience as the biggest thing in show biz. But this is ridiculous. It could never have been in the period in which this film is set. When radio was king it was different. And there is more. This duo has one comic who is English. Like Laurel and Hardy? Martin and Lewis were big but no one ran screaming after them. Women did not faint with excitement like they did for Frank Sinatra, and they do here. The film hinges on the comic duo being the hottest show in town, so much so that an attempt to blackmail them leads to dire consequences. I tried to follow the shifting root of the plot but found myself saying again and again, this simply does not add up. There's plenty of soft porn and a short lesbian scene thrown in to keep the punters happy. And a little attempted sodomy for good measure. The lobsters in the ice box are great. I have seen to movies by Atom and both have been blown up as great by the press. I pass. A movie for 17 year old boys.

Here's the 30-second pitch: Egoyan tries to do David Lynch doing Raymond Chandler, falls flat on face. Bacon and Firth are excellent, Lohman is terrible, the worst miscasting I've seen for decades. The plot is incomprehensible not because of complexity but rotten editing. The sex is good, and the lobsters deliver.With a better screenplay it could have been a great film in the class of LA Confidential, The Big Sleep or Mulholland Drive - that it fails so comprehensively must cast doubt on Egoyan's ability as a director, since the cast (apart from Alison Lohman) deliver really good performances, and it looks fabulous throughout. It feels to me as if Egoyan's avant-garde past prevented him from engaging with the requirements of a whodunnit plot. I was so confused that I had to look up the plot on my smartphone even while watching the movie, something that I've never, ever done before. That's how much I wanted to like it.

Oh, what a difference bad casting decision can make. " Where the truth lies" had such a great potential. Two very strong leading actors, Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth, intriguing story, creative director, but... The catastrophic acting of Alison Lohman sabotaged the whole thing. The utter lack of artistic presence, wobbly, girlish voice, completely at odds with the part. There are thousands of talented young actresses, and why in the world would you cast her. There was no saving this movie after that bad decision. Two leading protagonists were doing their very best, lovely camera work brought us back to the times long gone. But to no avail.What a shame.