Five Lies Ricky Gervais Wants You to Believe
Invention of Lying Holds Unpleasant Surprises
The basic idea throughout this movie is that these people exist in a parallel universe where everything is the same as modern America except that no one lies, no one omits information, and no one is even capable of a deceitful thought. Then Mark (played by Ricky Gervais) hits an especially depressing phase of his life and miraculously invents lying in order to get his job back, become cool, and get the girl.
This had great potential to be a very funny movie. Unfortunately it operates only with much suspension of disbelief from the audience, because the jokes have zero subtlety and even less clever thought behind them. Here are some of the glaring plot holes.
1. Honest people are all blathering idiots.
Okay, let’s take his insistence for a moment here that lying had never occurred to anyone because it was outside their nature. Let’s assume they had never been manipulated before. If an honest-to-the-bone person is presented with an elephant and informed that it’s a pig, they would at the very least assume that the person is mistaken.
But hey, this is comedy, and the audience would be willing to suspend disbelief for, say, a string of jokes. Perhaps even throughout the first act of the movie, we could sustain this sub-par joke that honesty is equal to a lack of brains. After the first few scenes, the joke gets a little old. After the first half, it is wearing. And for the remainder of the movie the one-liners get weaker and weaker and more difficult to pull off.
2. No one would have any inkling of afterlife or faith in an honest society.
If Gervais’ point here is to say that religion is full of lies, that’s one thing. It’s another to pretend that no one would have a sense of right and wrong, or any theories about a deity and afterlife. It’s a little insulting to a) cut out faith entirely, and b) only include vaguely Christian history and principles when they do come into play.
Really, if religion had to be brought into this, it should have at least made a clever remark about the state of things rather than taking the cheapest shot possible. This storyline was worthy of Ben Stiller’s ilk, not Gervais’.
3. Honest beautiful women will still end up marrying the biggest jerk in the room, because – yep, honest people are idiots.
Jennifer Garner has often played the most-beautiful-woman-in-the-room role. She has also played a beautiful woman who is intelligent, and she manages both quite well. Was it necessary for the female lead to be as shallow as possible? As dense and self-involved as one can get? It was a strange choice, and one that looked a little unbelievable coming from her.
4. Other than religion and possibly politics, the world would have turned out exactly the same without lies. Bars, fashion, architecture, major corporations, technology, and dating rituals would be almost exactly the same.
Was this part pure laziness? Yes, the sets and stories would have been much different if the idea had been thought through. It would have required quite a bit more planning. But Gervais is one of the handful of talented comedians in the business. And as such, the audience expects a little more. Why did he settle for this? He and Matthew Robinson (co-writer and co-director) could have gone a dozen different directions on this idea, and almost all of them could have been better than the one they decided on.
5. If someone writes a script containing so little sense as this, a handful of A-list stars will sign on to do cameos. No, wait… that one is true. Even though it’s hardly believable.
Tina Fey (Baby Mama), Phillip Seymour-Hoffman (Doubt), Jonah Hill (Superbad), and Edward Norton all appear in this movie. Fey especially is currently a superwoman of comedy, and her presence in this movie is completely baffling.
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