Deception (2008)

Deception arrives in 2008 with the confidence of a film that believes the phrase erotic thriller still moves tickets, and it departs with a ten percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and a C minus from CinemaScore. Marcel Langenegger's picture follows Jonathan McQuarry, a corporate auditor adrift among New York's power brokers, into an anonymous sex club called The List, and then into a frame-up involving twenty million dollars, a murdered woman, and a lawyer who is not a lawyer. The machinery is competent. The suspense is not.

The film's cultural ledger is close to blank. Lisa Gay Hamilton appears as a detective, Maggie Q as a woman with information, Malcolm Goodwin as a cabbie, and none of these presences is asked to mean anything. Race never becomes a subject. The eroticism is relentlessly heterosexual and organized around the protagonist's appetites, which leaves Michelle Williams' S occupying the familiar station of a femme fatale granted a flicker of agency before the plot requires her to be furniture. Wall Street supplies the scenery and the twenty million dollars, but the film regards finance the way a catalog regards a sofa: as an attractive thing to stand beside. No argument about capital is mounted, and none is intended.

Strip the plot away and a potboiler remains, and it never once stops to instruct its audience on how to live, because it never starts. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no corrective impulse. In a decade of cinema increasingly fond of the lecture, Deception wants only to show us a man in a nice coat looking worried in Madrid. It fails at even that, but it fails without preaching, and there is a kind of integrity in the failure.