IS there anything more boring than watching $20 million being electronically trans ferred to an offshore bank account? Maybe it’s someone repeatedly barking “You have no idea what I’m capable of!” into a cellphone.
Tired tropes like these ensure that the aptly named “Deception” – which starts out as a would-be erotic thriller with Ewan McGregor, Hugh Jackman and Michelle Williams – quickly devolves into a nonprescription alternative to Ambien.
You know Jonathan (McGregor), a timid accountant, is headed for big trouble when a stranger who calls himself Wyatt (Jackman) starts chatting him up at the legal firm where he’s doing an audit.
A shared doobie and al fresco lunch in Bryant Park – amid some mild homoerotic tension – leads to a supposedly accidentally exchange of cellphones. With Wyatt supposedly in London, Jonathan is accepting anonymous invitations (“intimacy without intricacy”) from beautiful career women in a sex club – including, no kidding, one played by Charlotte Rampling.
It’s painfully obvious to everyone but Jonathan that this is merely foreplay to get our hero smitten with a mysterious woman known only as S (Oscar winner Williams in a truly thankless role). Alas, she disappears during a rainy Chinatown tryst that looks like something Adrian Lyne and Wong Kar-wai might have cooked up jointly on a lark.
Suddenly Wyatt is back in the picture trying to blackmail Jonathan into executing the above-mentioned bank transfer to insure S’s safe return. But why does he leave his very incriminating cellphone with Jonathan? And what exactly is the point of framing our hero by murdering another member of the cellphone sex club?
From there, it’s the usual series of double-crosses and shifting loyalties. There’s also a climactic trip to Madrid, where banks apparently throw in a handsome pair of matching suitcases with every $20 million withdrawal.
In the unsteady hands of first-time director Marcel Langenegger and screenwriter Mark Bomback (“Live Free or Die Hard”), you can see these twists half an hour away – even those that don’t make any sense whatsoever.
Jackman (whose company produced this bomb) and McGregor, whose accents wander over three continents, barely seem interested in what’s going on. Nor will those unwise enough to wander into “Deception.”
DECEPTION
Two guys, a gal and a snooze.
Running time: 108 minutes. Rated R (violence, sex, profanity). At the Lincoln Square, the Union Square, others.