The wages of sin couldn't more clearly be death than in "Deception," a problematic action thriller disguised as a sexy morality tale, pitting Hugh Jackman's excess testosterone against Ewan McGregor's dearth of it.
The latter plays a mild-mannered corporate auditor, initiated by the former into an anonymous high-end Manhattan sex club known as The List. After the intro, all you need for sexual bliss is the right cell-phone number and a four-word question: "Are you free tonight?"
Jonathan (McGregor), the lonely numbers nerd, trusts his ever-so-cocky lawyer pal Wyatt (Jackman) implicitly in this forbidden new world. That's his first mistake. His second is failing to obey The Rules laid down by Charlotte Rampling, who helps him over the hump, so to speak, from shyness into hot sex: "No rough stuff, no business talk and no names."
- Starring: Ewan McGregor, Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams.
- Rating: R for sexual content, language, brief violence and some drug use.
- Web site: deception-movie.com
His third, and most serious, error is falling in love with a fragile femme fatale known to him only as "S" (Michelle Williams). She's so gorgeous and direct. They seduce each other so nicely in a Chinatown hotel.
"Maybe you should go," he says.
"Maybe you should stay," she replies.
Soon enough, he gets a thunk on the head and wakes up to find her gone and himself the prime suspect in her disappearance. At this point, Mark Bomback's script starts to flake out, with a preposterous blackmail twist: Jonathan must move 21 million big bucks in a funds transfer to Spain, or "they" will kill "S."
Naturally, he passes up multiple opportunities to tell or enlist the cops. Just as naturally, he falls for the standard device of avoiding a hostage-murder deadline by committing a self-incriminating electronic bank heist......
Director Marcel Langenegger shoots most of the film in New York and the final parts around Madrid's Paseo del Prada, to good effect. He knows his way around a continuity image, with a drop of water from a leaky pipe dovetailing into a drop into a coffee maker. He's also to be commended for several tasteful erotic montages.
But in the end, he can't overcome the script. Nor can he replicate Rampling's answer to the burning question of why women would do this sort of thing: "The same reason men do -- intimacy without intricacy."
Jackman and McGregor work hard, but a character-driven thriller needs characters worth driving. They and "Deception" are saddled with much more intricacy than intimacy.
First Published: April 25, 2008, 8:00 a.m.
