The Good Liar review: Mirren and McKellen's brutal revenge thriller is a giant con
Dir: Bill Condon. Cast: Ian McKellen, Helen Mirren, Russell Tovey, Jim Carter, Mark Lewis Jones, Bessie Carter. 15 cert, 109 mins
McKellen. Mirren. These royal titans of British acting have never graced our screens together until The Good Liar, which gets them to circle and outwit each other in a devious foxtrot – an enticing enough prospect.
They play a pair of lonely silver surfers in London, matched on an online dating site, whose burgeoning relationship is a con game – but in which direction? The film’s twists, alas, fall into one of two categories – the obvious and the tasteless – and the side-orders of gruesome violence feel like they’ve been delivered to quite the wrong table.
Both characters hide unguessed reserves of wealth and dark secrets. McKellen’s Roy is a professional swindler, hailing a cab right after their polite first lunch date for a dodgy business meeting at Stringfellows. (Their second date’s a trip to see Inglourious Basterds, which it’s hard to imagine either character suggesting once we’ve got to know them; weirdly, the film’s set in 2009, seemingly for this reason alone.)
While duping gullible investors and running off with their cash, Roy feigns a bad knee to gain sympathy and a new home – not only as a gentleman caller for the widowed Betty (Mirren) but as her live-in lodger in a retirement bungalow.
Planning to scam her by pooling their savings, Roy’s your average dirty rotten scoundrel – Steve Martin and Michael Caine combined. But without the comedy. Both leads are too seasoned not to play the initial situation as a relatively jolly grift, and a light, David-Mamet-style escapade pitting them against each other might have been exactly what the doctor ordered. But The Good Liar isn’t that. It winds up as a lunging, heavy-duty revenge thriller, and the more it turns into one, the less it thrills.
For the third time, McKellen is in the hands of Bill Condon, who gave him peachy roles as the gay director James Whale in Gods and Monsters (1998), and as a geriatric, bee-keeping Sherlock in Mr Holmes (2015). The latter’s screenwriter, Jeffrey Hatcher, is back on the case, but everything about Mr Holmes that was rather droll matinee fare gives way to a nastier, more curdled tone. Digging up the past, the film goes in for a couple of hefty flashbacks to Nazi Germany, which feel so miles away from anything we want to be watching it’s as if someone’s accidentally switched channels.
McKellen drops the C word – three times, by my count – but never in Mirren’s earshot. He’s a vicious brute posing as a doddery gent, and overdoing both assignments. There’s some grisly stuff with someone’s hand and a meat tenderiser, and someone’s head and the front of an oncoming tube train: listen closely, and you can hear poor souls at parish film clubs everywhere wailing to be shown the exit.
When Mirren’s Betty finally shows her cards, it’s to cue up a dingy finale featuring some absurd scrabbling under Berlin floorboards, for long-lost lockets we’ve never even noticed, containing scraps of hair we don’t much care about. It’s a plotty film whose plot either makes far-fetched leaps into clichéd historical periods, or shows its working ludicrously – Betty’s grandson (Russell Tovey) is a suspicious lad-about-town who just happens to be researching the career of Albert Speer.
The Good Liar is oddly misjudged as a title, too, in that it contains precisely zero good lies, and no one’s much good even at the bad ones. “A system for mismatching the delusional with the hopeless,” Betty declares, in a cumbersome stab at wit, of the online dating game – a subject it could more suspensefully have explored between two genuine strangers, which Betty and Roy turn out not to be. The film matchmakes its stars, assuming everything else will fall into place – but it’s lying to itself.
Subscriber reward: Click here to save up to 40% on tickets at more than 250 cinemas across the UK
