Avaliações do Metacritic

The pleasure of The Good Liar, and it’s a major one, is the chance to watch Mirren and McKellen act together in a cat-and-mouse duet that turns into an elegant waltz of affection and deception.

This movie rattles along with terrific energy and dash and the flashback sequences show that it’s actually far more daring and ambitious that you might expect. It’s a great duel between McKellen and Mirren.

The back and forth, the listening and reacting between Mirren and McKellen, as each of their characters gauges the other and as we mark the incremental shifts and exchanges of power, is pure pleasure.

Pleasant and preposterous in almost precisely equal measure, the film never offers anything less than two all-time British actors having the time of their lives, which makes it hard to get frustrated that it seldom offers anything more.

A con-artist movie that is something of a con itself.

McKellen and Mirren, sharing the screen for the first time, are exquisitely matched in this slight but enjoyable yarn, which is like watching two magnificent vintage cars in a road race, without minding too much who wins.

For all its nasty twists and turns, its fake-outs and flashbacks and pile-up of double-crosses, this story of an elderly con man and the wealthy widow he targets feels fatally devoid of danger. Square, tame and tidy as the London-area house kept by Mirren’s primly elegant, creamy-complexioned septuagenarian, The Good Liar is a work of skill but little spark.

The Good Liar really wants to be either a thriller or a caper. Unfortunately, it has neither the excitement necessary for the former nor the fun required of the latter.

Hoping to be a stylish, witty conman thriller, The Good Liar starts out as an amusing lark but fails to stay ahead of its audience, piling on the ludicrousness until it’s impossible to take the proceedings seriously.

The film’s twists, alas, fall into one of two categories – the obvious and the tasteless – and the side-orders of gruesome violence feel like they’ve been delivered to quite the wrong table.