On Screen
Deception
BY Stuart Berman April 24, 2008 12:04
By calling a movie about double crosses and identity theft Deception, you forfeit your right to a Spoiler Alert — and the fact that the film’s own press kit features stills from several key late scenes simply underscores Deception’s ill-fated attempts to deceive.
But then the writing is on the glass boardroom wall from the opening shot, which finds loner corporate auditor Jonathan McQuarry (Ewan McGregor) working late in a desolate skyscraper office. It’s there that he has a chance (or is it?) encounter with his own real-life Tyler Durden — a hot-shot lawyer named Wyatt Bose (Hugh Jackman) who is everything the nerdy and naïve Jonathan is not: he’s handsome, has a great backhand and speaks authoritatively about Gerhard Richter paintings.
After an accidental (or is it?) cellphone swap, Jonathan finds himself fielding his new friend’s booty calls — only to discover they’re all part of an anonymous hookup network for overworked, non-committal professionals (and fortunately for him, the nympho investment bankers in this world all look like Natasha Henstridge and Charlotte Rampling). But fate soon comes a-callin’ in the form of a mysterious blond (Michelle Williams), who just happens to be the same hottie Jonathan was eyeing on the subway a few days previous. (Of course, in her case, he just wants to have dinner and cuddle.) Needless to say, this femme comes with a healthy dose of fatale, and Wyatt turns out to be less interested in Jonathan’s friendship than his access to certain corporate accounts.
Rookie director Marcel Langenegger tries to bolster this contrived premise with vague allusions to Hitchcock’s Rear Window (by emphasizing the voyeuristic qualities of high-rise urbanity) and Vertigo (with Jonathan becoming creepily obsessed with his possibly complicit love interest), but Deception swiftly devolves into another cyber-heist flick where the action amounts to typing in passwords and waiting for files to download. And with this clockwork construction comes the inevitable and increasingly ineffectual series of plot twists — the most ridiculous being that, for all its stylized titillation, Deception would have you believe that, at its core, it’s a love story.
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