Interestingly enough I was feeling kind of ambitious and decided to watch two movies this particular day. The first being this movie, the sexually charged, relatively big budgeted thriller ‘Deception’, and the second be the sexually charged decidedly low budgeted Cinemax worthy thriller ‘Sexual Predator’. Even though one movie had to break the bank to get Hugh Jackman and Ewan McGregor to show up for work and the other had to simply shake the piggy bank for Richard Grieco and Angie Everhart, and still had money left over for lunch, it’s fairly amazing to see that both movies sucked about the same. Sure ‘Deception’ had higher production values, a cinematographer who really knew what he was doing and exotic locales and stuff, and though I was always taught that throwing money at a problem makes that problem go away, this is an axiom that might work in all walks of life except for movies.

Jonathan McQuarry (McGregor) is a completely milk toast, boring, lifeless accountant auditor who has virtually no life outside of his numbers, that is until one late night he meets the dashing lawyer Wyatt Bose (Jackman). The two enjoy a toke and a laugh and the next thing you know they are fast friends enjoying the occasional game of tennis, fancy dinners and trips to swanky nightclubs with Jonathan seeing quite clearly how crappy his life is compared to Wyatt, the ultimate player.

Then comes the old accidental cell phone switch one day at lunch. Wyatt allegedly is off in London somewhere making a deal, so Jonathan can’t give his cell phone back immediately, which is a good thing because Jonathan gets a call from a sexy voice on Wyatt’s cell phone asking him if ‘he’s free tonight’. Uh, the answer to that would be ‘hell to the yes’ and Jonathan shows up at a posh hotel, is met by a sophisticatedly dressed woman who looks exactly like Natasha Henstridge and the two have nasty sex, no questions asked, no money exchanged. Outstanding. Turns out that Wyatt is in a

sex club where incredibly beautiful, sexy, horny and successful women who have no time for that whole ‘dating’ rigmarole simply call one of the cell phone numbers on the list and voila! Free nasty unattached sex which Jonathan takes FULL advantage of. Considering the women on this list on average consist of likes of Ms. Henstridge, Maggie Q, and even Charlotte Rampling who even at close to one hundred and four years old is still quite doable, a brother just needs to now how can he be down. That’s all I need to know. Please forward any information.

The good times come to an end when Jonathan meets up one evening, via the list, with the lady S (Michelle Williams), who he just so happened to meet by ‘chance’ on a subway a few weeks earlier. Now Jonathan thinks he’s in love with the woman who is in an anonymous sex club and whose name he doesn’t know, which then leads to the dashing Wyatt revealing himself for who he really is, a murdering kidnapping extorting thief. Wyatt needs Jonathan to extort a few million from one of the firms he’s auditing or he will murderize the lady S who he has kidnapped, and if Jonathan thinks Wyatt is playing games, he gives him a little sampling of what he is capable of. Now Jonathan is severely up against it as the cops think he might be a murder, the woman he loves is in severe peril, and he is about to become an embezzler of massive amounts of funds. Oh my.

Actually ‘Deception’ is far more insidious than the movie ‘Sexual Predator’ because you knew almost immediately that ‘Sexual Predator’ was going to blow, but ‘Deception’ had the nerve to lift you up as you thought you were about to see something cleverly wicked, only to be dropped into a sea of total lunacy. I can even pinpoint the exact moment when this happened. ‘Deception’ certainly had a great beginning with Hugh Jackman overplaying Wyatt Bose as the dashing player to the hilt, and obviously having fun doing it. Even the tired device of the ‘cell phone switch’ worked because it sent the movie to some seriously seedy depths which we always appreciate, because we do enjoy a movie for grown ups with naked people, fake sex, and profanity. Then came the time for the thriller aspects and for Wyatt to hit Jonathan with the heavy stuff. So a distraught Jonathan, after Wyatt informs him of his plan, asks Wyatt why he should believe him since all he has done is lie to him up to this point. Wyatt responds something to the effect ‘I didn’t lie, that was just foreplay… and now you’re f**ked’. God that was awful. Even Hugh Jackman couldn’t save that terrible line and it was all down hill from there.

You see what follows next is a series of impossibly improbable and unbelievable events which even the most ardent suspenders of belief will have a hard time getting past. With each passing moment something sillier trumps something silly that we had just seen, until the movie devolves into pure craziness leaving the hapless movie watcher to just throw his or her hands up in the air and simply enjoy the pretty pictures passing by in front of their eyes. Even the the naked people dried up and disappeared. The actors were fine, particularly Jackman who really seemed to take this role to heart. but Michelle Williams, all 68 pounds of her, seemed lost in a terribly underwritten role as the hooker with the heart of gold / femme fatale / love interest / snub nosed pistol packer – or whatever she was designed to be.

Alas if Director Marcel Langenegger could have just pulled back a little bit, because the movie was definitely over-directed, shaved off some of the stupidity, made the movie a little less serious and a little more fun and dirty – and by that I mean he might have tried channeling DePalma instead of Hitchock, ‘Deception’ could have been a sleazy, guilty classic. Instead it was sleazy guilty disappointment.

One last thing. During the film Ewan McGregor’s character asked the Maggie Q character why she continued to dial up Wyatt’s sex number even though she was scared to death of him. Maggie replies, ‘Have you ever had it so good that you’d rather die than be without it?’ Man, if I had a nickel for every time a woman told me that… shoot… I’d be about five cents short of a nickel.