Wednesday

Two films that sound like they might work but don't are Deception and The Upside of Anger. They're the kind of films, Deception especially, that probably made a good pitch to a producer, make a good trailer, but fail to deliver over 90 minutes. Deception stars Ewan McGregor as an accountant who is befriended by Hugh Jackman. They accidentally swap phones and McGregor starts receiving calls from anonymous women asking to meet him in hotels and have sex. This all quite intriguing. The problem is that the film then goes off on another tangent and we never really discover what the hotel business was all about. It gets forgotten for a much more routine storyline. The Upside of Anger, on the other hand, suffered either from bad casting, or bad advertising. The problem is that it is a romance, a comedy and a tragedy, and yet none of these. Kevin Costner is also in an unusual role, a retired alcoholic sportsman, probably uncomfortable to his normal audience. Starting from the end and then going back, the voice-over and the lacklustre performances serve to make this an uninteresting film, to me at least, which lost my attention frequently throughout. These are two films that serve to warn you about watching a movie merely because the premise sounds interesting. More often than not, that is all that's interesting about them.