Deception*1/2
One of the producers says in the production notes that he considers this movie as “something of a throwback to an earlier era of filmmaking.” He must be referring to the 1980s, because this feels like the kind of slick, mindless thriller Adrian Lyne used to make–for better and for worse. For a while, it has the guilty-pleasure allure of a 9 1/2 Weeks or a Fatal Attraction, and it certainly resembles the British director’s aesthetic with its good-looking characters, urban setting and cool, steely grays and blues.
Eventually, though, it collapses into such a ridiculous pile of plot twists and double crosses, there’s nothing pleasurable about it, guilty or otherwise. The director, for the record, is first-timer Marcel Langenegger, who’s working from a script by Mark Bomback (Live Free or Die Hard). Together they’ve come up with one of those movies in which supposedly smart people do incredibly stupid things, and all you can do is stare at the screen and shake your head in disbelief.
Ewan McGregor puts on a hammy New York accent to star as a lonely, naive accountant whose life consists of working late nights. Hugh Jackman is all charisma and expensive suits as the lawyer who introduces him to a secret, executive sex club. And Michelle Williams, glammed up to look like Gwyneth Paltrow, plays the femme fatale caught in the middle of a deadly scheme.
Standard Operating Procedure****
Errol Morris doesn’t condemn the soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison, the ones who shot and posed for those photographs that shocked the world nearly five years ago, though it would have been easy for him to do so. But the veteran documentarian doesn’t exactly let them off the hook, either. He simply allows them to look into the camera and tell us what happened, why they did what they did–matter-of-factly, and with disarming candor.
That’s probably the greatest strength of Morris’ film, which isn’t quite as powerful as his 2003 Academy Award winner, The Fog of War, but still has its startling moments nonetheless. Yes, Morris covers much of the same ground Rory Kennedy did last year with her HBO film Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. He interviews many of the same guards at the infamous prison and similarly doesn’t spare us from the graphic pictures–images of humiliation and abuse we’ve seen countless times, yet they still turn the stomach.
What this self-described detective filmmaker does is reach the conclusion, after two years of investigation, that these soldiers were following orders in a situation where everything resembling civility and humanity seemed out of order. And he forces us to ask ourselves what we would have done in their position–whether or not we like the answer.