The Invention of Lying: Critic Reviews

The truth? Ricky Gervais' jolting philosophical comedy The Invention of Lying is seriously subversive. What other rom-com would spend so much time making a convincing case that belief in an afterlife is a harmless load of bollocks?

A mostly funny if melancholic defense of deceit.

His comedy pretends to be unthreatening, a harmless little wheeze, and then pushes the envelope to its logical conclusion.

By adhering to the romantic-comedy formula, The Invention of Lying stops short of being truly inventive. But enough sequences are fresh and inspired to make this a comedy honestly worth catching.

With The Invention of Lying, the British comic actor Ricky Gervais has come up with a wickedly funny idea for a movie -- and then purged the wickedness right out of it.-

Lying brushes more big ideas than commonplace comedies, but hasn't taken those ideas through enough drafts to work out their implications or -- harder still -- make them killingly funny.

The movie is smart and silly.

Mr. Gervais's long-established gift for small-screen comedy goes terribly slack, leaving him likable, as always, but, on the big screen, looking lost.

There's no doubting that this is one comic who can really act. But maybe Gervais should leave the directing to someone who knows how to tell funny stories on film, if such a talent can be found these days.

The movie is something rare, a boisterous American comedy with the power to trigger philosophical disputes -- even, if taken really seriously, fisticuffs. One can hope!

The last third of the movie is as bad as anything I've seen this year, with the laughs trailing off, and half of the supporting characters, the zestier ones, being airbrushed from the frame.

Gervais, who co-directed and co-wrote with Matthew Robinson, walks a delicate tightrope above hazardous chasms.

I think the first half hour would be almost impossible to sustain because it is so inspired.

The romantic plot, involving his unrequited loved for Garner, is soured by her character's unconcealed shallowness.

Sublimely funny, slyly satirical and deliberately designed to upset Aunt Prissy, The Invention of Lying weaves quite a wicked web.

Lying is good, but it could have been great. And that's no lie.

While it never tops the explosive hilarity of its first 20 minutes, The Invention of Lying is a smartly written, nicely layered comedy.

Marketed as a romantic comedy, The Invention of Lying turns out to be a dour, shouty atheist manifesto.

[A] droll, witty and thoughtful comedy about the thing that really makes the world go round.

To tell the truth, The Invention of Lying is a funny movie that fails to deliver on its first-half potential.

There are cycles of inspiration and rebirth, but the barbed promise of the early going loses its way in choices aimed at sentimentality rather than, as Harvey Kurtzman memorably put it, humor in a jugular vein.

The result is an erratically funny but often frustrating comedy, with an interesting premise hobbled by internal inconsistencies and uneven writing.

There's no hope that Gervais' performance in The Invention of Lying will open up new hope for a different kind of leading man -- and that's what makes his resoluteness so great.

Despite the ambitious scope of its premise, this confounding, disappointing and, in the end, depressing movie is content to devote 80 percent of its screen time to wondering who gets to kiss the girl.