Mckellen and Mirren? I’d be lying if I said it was any good
Mckellen. Mirren. These 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 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. While duping gullible investors and running off with their cash, he 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 without the 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.
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.
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. It matchmakes its stars, assuming everything else will fall into place – but it’s lying to itself.