Puppetmister

Remember that joke in Annie Hall where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are trying to flirt, and the subtitles reveal what they're really thinking? It's a charming little gag, right? Now imagine that it was extended across the whole film – every single line of dialogue was captioned with an "honest" translation that punctured each character's attempt at wit, persuasion or self-promotion. It would be excruciatingly tiresome after a few minutes, right? If you suspect that the previous sentence is true, you don't need to read any further than this – The Invention of Lying will bore you rigid, and you should avoid it at all costs. If you need more persuasion, perhaps I should bring out the big guns, an insult I don't deploy lightly: The Invention of Lying is the worst film I've seen at the cinema since Highlander II.

From the very first minute, I was distracted by the inconsistencies of the film's "high concept". It's set in a world where humans have evolved without the ability to lie, and so they seem duty bound to spout whatever's on the top of their head. It begins with Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner going on a date – she, of course, immediately declares that she finds him unattractive and will not be having sex with him. It's a neat way to set out the rules of this world, but the flatness of the humour left me enough laughless minutes to get distracted, and it all collapsed. So, people deliver brutal statements of disinterest and verbal abuse at every turn, yet nobody ever gets offended? And still they prattle in with communication that is never met with a reaction? If total truth-telling makes people very efficient and utilitarian in their choices, why do people bother persisting on bad dates? Why is Gervais' boss nervous about firing him if nobody cares about causing offence? So, everybody believes everything at face value, never questions authority, yet human history has developed exactly as it has in the real world? Science and technology developed normally, even though there was presumably never a need for the curiosity and inquiry needed for such things? Can people behave deceitfully if they don't say untruths out loud? Ricky Gervais invented God so that people might have something to make them feel better about dying? Phew, that settles the possibility that making up fantasies to cope with the vicissitudes of a harsh and random universe is a natural human instinct. But … where did that church come from? Now, I really shouldn't have been thinking about any of this. I should have been too busy laughing. I didn't sit through Woody Allen's Sleeper (another film in which a comedy writer built a plot around portraying himself as a privileged outsider who runs rings around a robotic, pliant society due to his exceptional grasp of societal instincts,) worrying about the impossibility of cryogenics and cyber-dogs. That's because Sleeper is full of great jokes. The Invention of Lying was met with almost complete stony silence, and that was in a city-centre multiplex on a Friday night. In a cinema that sells beer in the aisles. Personally, I laughed once, and that was during a cameo from Steven Merchant and Barry from Eastenders that is so daft and incongruous that it just lightened the whole mood by stepping out of the plodding, self-important movie that had clumsily tried to incorporate it.

Ricky Gervais has built a career out of self-mockery, but it's not fooling anyone when it's a sideways strategy to buy himself the right to schmaltzy, self-aggrandising plot lines where the world comes to recognise him for who he really is: of course he's a better, more rounded human being than everyone else – he's written everyone else to be a self-absorbed, shallow wage slave and then placed them in a world that automatically justifies him lazily keeping them that way. It's an ego comedy in the tradition of What Women Want (Mel Gibson is the only man who can hear what ladies have in their brains! Imagine the possibilities!) Bruce/Evan Almighty (Jim Carrey/Steve Carrell becomes God/Noah! Watching them exercise their powers on an unsuspecting world is bound to be hilarious!), but there's also a hint that Gervais fancies himself as a Larry David-style, misanthropic sage, cutting through the bullshit of a boobytrapped social scene with his own brand of common sense (and bringing in celeb friends in the process). But in this script he's hidebound by sentiment and half-baked religious satire.

I've seen some dodgy HK movies in my time, but this has to rank pretty highly in the roll-call of stinkers. An unstructured, clumsily-paced mess from start to finish, with little in the way of a plot and so much thunderous noise and self-conscious 'scary stuff' that it never comes close to creating the quietly unsettling atmosphere needed to set up the viewer for a scare. The bargain-basement 3-D effects (a surprise considering CGI-fiend Andrew Lau's involvement) simply don't work on a DVD viewing (and providing only one pair of glasses is pretty cheap!) due to the poor colour balance. I will think twice before snapping up any more gimmicky films from bargain bins...

When I first saw this, I assumed it was a film school short (now I see it's not) because of its look-at-me sensationalism and finger-painted handling of sexual politics and issues of voyeurism. Yet another hypocritical assertion that the camera is essentially a tool of violation and penetration, depending on the viewer's desire to see transgressive imagery while distancing itself from the plebeian viewers it wants to accuse of such desires by being hermetically sealed within an own upscale New York dance studio. Ironic misogyny is still misogyny.