Where the Truth Lies (2005)

This gets a 5 only because Firth's and Bacon's performances could make any movie seem good. Still, I'm surprised that actors of their caliber would appear in a movie like this. Their performances were brilliant, but the writing was all over the place with some really dull lines. This movie could have been a whole lot better with a more artful screenplay and someone (ANYONE) other than Allison Lohman playing the lead. She is the most expressionless "actress" I have ever seen. She played the part in this film with the same affect as she used in "White Oleander." It worked in that part, but not in this one. And, the writing. Really? NO writer who was good enough to be given a $1 million story would take drugs with the subject of her book. And the whole airplane "coincidence" was ridiculous.Firth's and Bacon's performances would have made a multi-award-winning movie with a little more attention to script editing and a better actress playing the journalist. Think of how good this movie would have been with Jennifer Lawrence in it.

Here's the 30-second pitch: Egoyan tries to do David Lynch doing Raymond Chandler, falls flat on face. Bacon and Firth are excellent, Lohman is terrible, the worst miscasting I've seen for decades. The plot is incomprehensible not because of complexity but rotten editing. The sex is good, and the lobsters deliver.With a better screenplay it could have been a great film in the class of LA Confidential, The Big Sleep or Mulholland Drive - that it fails so comprehensively must cast doubt on Egoyan's ability as a director, since the cast (apart from Alison Lohman) deliver really good performances, and it looks fabulous throughout. It feels to me as if Egoyan's avant-garde past prevented him from engaging with the requirements of a whodunnit plot. I was so confused that I had to look up the plot on my smartphone even while watching the movie, something that I've never, ever done before. That's how much I wanted to like it.

This film asks you to imagine what it would have been like if Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had broken up their comedy team, not because they couldn't stand each other anymore, but because one of them killed a girl. It's an intriguing idea. Unfortunately, this movie never lives up to that promise. It turns into a pointlessly convoluted and almost laughably conceived "thriller" where poor Alison Lohman is hung out to dry in a starring role she's not ready for.Vince Collins and Lanny Morris (Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon) are a famous show biz duo of the 1950s. Vince is the class and Lanny the scoundrel and they're rich and famous, lighting up movie screens and night clubs all over America. After performing a 39 hour telethon for charity in Miami, they fly to New Jersey to open up a new night club. That's when a dead girl from Miami turns up in Vince and Lanny's New Jersey hotel suite. 15 years later in the early 1970s, a young journalist named Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman) is looking to write a book about Collins and Morris. She's gotten a publisher to fork over a million dollars to get Vince to finally talk about their lives and careers and especially what happened to that dead girl. When Karen finds out that Lanny is writing his own book, she becomes even more determined to uncover the secret that Vince and Lanny have been protecting for so long.The good things about Where the Truth Lies are that it has a nice amount of nudity, including lots of Kevin Bacon's bare behind for the ladies and some of the gentlemen, one really fine sex scene and superb performances from Bacon and Colin Firth. They essentially have to create multiple versions of the same men. They not only have to portray Vince and Lanny at the height of their talent and fame as well as on the downside of their careers and lives, they also have to show us Vince and Lanny both as they really are and the personas they hide behind when facing the rest of the world. They make you want to see more of Vince and Lanny as big stars of the 50s and make you feel sorry for them as fading stars of the 70s.All of that, however, isn't nearly enough to overcome all the problems with this film. To start with, Alison Lohman does a poor job with her role. Karen O'Connor is a complex and demanding character that not only has to measure up to Vince and Lanny but has to carry a lot of the story all by herself. At this point in her career, Lohman is clearly not in the same acting league as Bacon and Firth. She gives Karen all the emotional depth of a teenage girl working behind a department story make-up counter. Lohman seems to have talent, but she has none of the skills needed for this sort of performance and becomes a void that drains all the energy out of the story.For its own part, this story is overly complex and badly structured. There are dueling narrators and multiple flashbacks, different versions of the same events and totally unnecessary subterfuge. The murder of the Miami girl is barely referenced in the first half of the movie and then completely dominates the second half, creating different tones and paces for the two halves. And then there's the secret of the dead Miami girl. Oy. I suppose it might have seemed like a clever twist when somebody first came up with it, either writer/director Atom Egoyan or Rupert Holmes who wrote the book upon which this movie is based. It should have only seemed clever for 5 seconds, though, because it gets dumber and dumber and dumber the more you think about it.Where the Truth Lies is skillfully directed and Bacon and Firth give appealing and layered performances, but the movie is fatally compromised by too many moments when you're watching it and thinking "You've got to be kidding me". This is one of those DVDs you see sitting on the shelf and you wonder why you haven't heard of it because there are some reasonably big stars in it. The reason why you haven't heard of this film and the others like it is that they're just plain bad. Instead of wasting money promoting it in theaters, these things are puked almost directly into video stores where they wait for some unsuspecting sucker to rent them. Don't be one of the suckers who rents Where the Truth Lies.

Alison Lohman is a young journalist trying to find out "Where the Truth Lies" in this 2005 film starring Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth and Maury Chaykin. Bacon and Firth are a kind of Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis team, and a dead girl is found in one of their hotel suites. Karen (Lohman) is to assist part of the act, Vince (Firth) in writing his memoirs years later. She has a hidden agenda, which is to learn how Maureen Flaherty, a maid in a Las Vegas hotel, was found dead in a New Jersey hotel suite all those years ago.As a film, this left me pretty cold; indeed, everything about it is cold, including some very good performances from Bacon and Firth. Nothing warmed up the camera, though. Alison Lohman was so bad she was laughable. I had very little interest in whodunit or why because I didn't care about anyone.There's lots of sex, nudity and drug-taking, and I frankly didn't realize this was a controversial part of the film. I agree that an R rating would have been fine. I'm sure the guys loved it.I'm always amazed that when a film is this bad, how people go out of their way to declare it a master of film-making. Where the Truth Lies reminded me of Leaving Las Vegas - terrible.