Review of Lies & Illusions (2009) by Jesse B — 15 Feb 2012

Lies and Illusions (Tibor Takács, 2009).

After a quick check of the admittedly rather incomplete spreadsheet I keep of all the movies I've seen (anything I watched before June 2007, thanks to a hard drive crash, relies on my often-faulty memory or reviews I wrote after seeing the films in question), Lies and Illusions is, by far, the best Tibor Takács-directed movie I have ever seen. (A quick check of IMDB reveals this may not be true; Takács directed The Gate, which I remember seeing in the theatre back in 1986, but haven't seen it since, so can't remember enough to rate it.) It is worth noting, however, that everything is relative when it comes to such statements. The three other Takács movies sitting on my list have either one star (Rats, the infamous Mansquito) or zero stars (Earthquake: Nature Unleashed). So I can call Lies and Illusions "the best Tibor Takács-directed movie I have ever seen" and still, in the next paragraph, compare it to a steaming pile of horse feces, and have the pile come up looking the better of the two. Ain't life grand?

Plot: a hapless writer of self-help books, Wes Wilson (Christian Slater, in case you've been wondering what he's been up to since his brief A-list reign in the nineties), is engaged to a lovely lass named Sam (Cleaner's Sarah Ann Schultz). Until, that is, he is jumped from behind after a party and knocked out. When he comes to, Sam has disappeared, kidnapped, and presumably killed, by arch-criminal Isaac Kahn (Cuba Gooding, Jr., in case you've been wondering what HE's been up to since his brief A-list reign in the nineties). Sam's lawyer, Andrew (Infection's Lochlyn Munro), informs Wes that she left him pretty much everything, and that if she's not found within a year, it all reverts to him. Fast-forward a year, Wes is slowly starting to move on with his life, including having started to fall for Nicole (Drive Angry's Christa Campbell) a hot wrtier for a women's magazine who seduced him during an interview. There's one problem, however-it seems that Sam stole something from Isaac back in the day, and Isaac believes that something is in a safety deposit box in Spokane that Wes has just been given possession of, due to the terms of Sam's will...

I actually started out kind of liking the first half of this movie. Yes, I grant you, the script (by first-timer Eric James, who has no other credits at all on IMDB) is awful, but it at least tries to develop its characters, however badly it may fail, and it throws in a few not-so-plausible-but-still-pretty-cool plot twists. And then we get to Spokane, and it is there that the movie begins to resemble the aforementioned pile. At that point, it becomes ludicrous in the extreme, both in the almost nonexistent script and in the barely-held-together string of action sequences and awful CGI.

But still, there are movies like that that can be enjoyable, at least on a guilty pleasure level. (I am, unapologetically, a huge fan of Alien vs. Predator.) What really sent me to the garage to grab a sladgehammer with the intent of doing harm to the television, is that after all those annoying action sequences (but before the bad CGI), we actually have the beginnings of the story... and the end of the movie. It's all setup followed by five minutes of worthless payoff. To be fair, that there was any setup at all raises it above the level of Takács' abovementioned pieces of Sci-Fi Channel Original Junk, and there's a reason both Slater and Gooding got so popular, however briefly, back in the day. They have not gotten any worse as actors, they're just getting crappy material. Also of note, for those who enjoy such things, there's an absolutely ridiculous catfight scene. **.