'Deception'

Rating:

BY MICHAEL PHILLIPS | Chicago Tribune

April 25, 2008

It takes more than a middle-period- Hitler haircut and a pair of specs to render Ewan McGregor unto dweebdom. The actor may have undertaken one too many nude scenes in his career to convincingly inhabit the soul of a mouse, even one morphing into a rutting, wolfish Lothario.

In "Deception" McGregor plays a socially maladroit auditor who has a chance meeting (or is it?) with a flashy lawyer (or is he?) played by Hugh Jackman. In the blink of a narrative eye Jackman's Wyatt Bose befriends McGregor's Jonathan McQuarry. He introduces him to a sex club known as The List, where it's all about swanky hotels, anonymity and improbable lingerie. Members of The List are all workaholics looking for what one Wall Street whiz calls "intimacy without intricacy." Charlotte Rampling utters that line with a wised-up Continental air.

Director Marcel Langenegger cannot get enough of the chilly blues and grays of Manhattan. The first 30 minutes hum along on atmosphere, and the promise of sexual danger. As a thriller, however, "Deception" can't get enough of the obvious: Each story revelation is flagrantly telegraphed. By the time the action moves to Madrid, Jackman's business-attire Mephistopheles has to explicate some of the clumsiest exposition this side of Donald Sutherland in "JFK."

With an arresting look of bruised desire, Michelle Williams plays McQuarry's true love, a woman caught up in The List. So you can find true love in sex clubs!

DECEPTION (R). A socially inept auditor patronizes an X-rated club and gets swept up in a woman's disappearance. With Hugh Jackman, Ewan McGregor and Michelle Williams. 1:48 (adult content, language, brief violence and drug use). At area theaters.