The Invention Of Lying: a film i saw recently that i will now review

Before I review this film I am obliged to tell a story. It's a story about a boy and a girl, in the early part of this very same decade. The boy asks the girl to accompany him to a film, and that film was a film about a house. This house was a strange one, it contained corpses, and not just a few corpses, several, say, a thousand. And despite the film featuring the talents of a future "The Office" actor, that girl who agreed to see "an art film" insisted her date owed her one romantic comedy for every corpse in the film. "The Invention of Lying" is #42.

So Ricky Gervais gives us another turn of the RomCom wheel, as a down and out dude who develops the ability to tell untruths in a world where that sort of thing has never been done. He turns his gift into fortune and glory with a trip to the casino (But sir, I was on thirty) in a few minutes and spends the rest of the movie getting the girl but not before committing a most fundamentally bizarre act of ?blasphemy?.

OK, so, nobody ever told a lie right, so Ricky tells his mom, who's on death's door, that there will be an afterlife full of love and happiness. As fiction has never been realized, this idea is a new one, and as no one on earth has never before born false witness, everyone assumes that because someone said it, it is true. So apart from being rich and famous, the protagonist is now seen as, and acts as, a medium for "The man in the sky". Ricky delivering his layman ten commandments on the back of pizza boxes would have been the funniest part of the movie, but it was kind of ruined by weird timing and an obvious lead up.

The most remarkable thing in this film is the director\lead actor\producer's ability to have Louis CK not be funny for an entire flick. My thinking is that old Ricky got a little uptight about anybody topping the old eh eh eh... no wait no hey-I'm-a-British-person and thusly hamstringed the whole of his formidable supporting cast. Maybe I'm wrong, it seems like Jennifer Garner speaking frankly about masturbating before a bad date should be funny, but, no.

It was alright, but it wasn't nearly as good as it could have been with the seven thousand A-list cameos. I like his standup and I like his style, but on this side of the pond you have to do better than this if you want to make the move from sensation to institution. A swing and a miss kids.