Some collaborations, working together, have created a number of fine movies over the years. Look at Scorsese and De Niro, Hitchcock and composer Bernard Hermann, and the Johns Wayne and Ford. But there’s also director Bill Condon and actor Ian McKellen, and the two have worked together, for the most part, on some fairly high quality movies–the live action Beauty and the Beast notwithstanding.
The pair come back for a new thriller, The Good Liar, adding Hellen Mirren for a movie with an impressive-looking roster. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a particularly stand-out movie. And considering my first attempt to see the movie ended with some free passes due to a projector malfunction, I really hoped the movie was worth it rather than, say, seeing Tom Hanks play Mr. Rogers.
Sadly, it wasn’t quite that interesting. To be sure, it’s a competently put together movie without any real missteps, but at the same time, it doesn’t seem to rise above the cookie-cutter demands of a story of its kind.
The movie opens with McKellen and Mirren each making their own online profiles in the year 2009. That date doesn’t really do much here aside from make the timing of the story more plausible. The pair meet for a lunch date after the credits, and each quickly states the names on their respective profiles are aliases. McKellen says his real name is Roy, and he values honesty above all else. Mirren’s character is apparently named Betty, and the two hit it off.
Of course, we learn very quickly Roy is a con man, looking to rob a lonely widow who is just looking for companionship. He’s done this before, and he’s doing it now. His only real obstacle seems to be Betty’s highly suspicious grandson Steven (Russell Tovey), a graduate student with some good research skills of his own.
Or, is it? Every so often, the movie shows Betty giving a look the audience is certainly meant to find suspicious or she does something that isn’t quite explained right away.
And therein lies the biggest problem with The Good Liar. The movie makes no bones about Roy’s inherent dishonesty. But Betty’s occasional suspicious acts put me on edge, wondering what exactly she was pulling in a con of her own. Admittedly, none of my guesses were ultimately correct, and one that looked really obvious turned out to be incorrect, but the fact I was actually looking for them was something of a distraction, giving me the idea that Betty wasn’t the innocent she appeared to be.
Granted, she was using an alias when she and Roy met, so there’s that.
That leads to the issue that Mirren, a brilliant actress in her own right, is largely underused. McKellen’s Roy is clearly the main focus of the movie, so he gets the lion’s share of the screentime. To be sure, McKellen is also a great actor, and he does his usual fine job as Roy. And Mirren isn’t exactly a slouch as Betty. Betty just has a lot less to do as a character, and many of her scenes had me thinking she was faking something just because of the way the movie was set up.
All things being equal, The Good Liar is an average thriller of its type, and it didn’t really strike me as all that special either way.
Grade: C+
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