My Review of "The Invention of Lying"

The Invention of Lying is a comedy that came out back in 2009. That's a long time ago and social norms were quite different back then as well. I definitely noticed that in this movie. There are a number of things that would never have passed if they attempted to make this movie today but there are still some interesting insights that were made with this movie.

It all starts out with a bit of narration from our main character Mark. He introduces the world that he lives in. Everyone speaks the truth and cannot tell a lie. Unfortunately for him he had not won the lottery in genetics or social situation.

He's an unattractive man that is about to lose his job. Everything is going against him and then out of nowhere he gains the ability to lie. With this new found power he immediately understands its significance. The problem is how does he utilize this new found power without going over his morale threshold? In fact, what is his morale threshold.

I kind of wished that they explored his morale threshold even more. There's a lot of comedy that comes out of this discovery. They only briefly talked about this but then went back to a different path. It felt like this movie has an agenda about explaining religion and it's significance to our society.

They basically tell us that our society needs to make lies all the time in order to make society as a whole to be happy. It all stems from the moment when Mark's mother is dying in the hospital. He makes up a story about the afterlife in order to soothe his mother as she was dying. This is overheard by the staff and the whole thing becomes a huge religious path for their world.

This movie makes tons of parallels to certain thing in religions and why they believed the events transpired. At this point I start getting it and this becomes the target of the majority of the jokes in this movie. It starts to get old pretty fast and gets awkward because I didn't sign up for this and it felt like it was a sneak attack.

There is a romantic interest in this movie that has some interesting points but this is kind of lost to the religious undertones throughout the movie. It's too bad because there was some potential in this storyline.

I also found it quite weird how they acted in this truth telling world. It was like they lived in a society where everyone has Asperger's. They will tell people whatever thought crosses their mind at the moment regardless of people's feelings. This happens a lot throughout the movie and it's hard to believe that this would happen. Also the whole situation with the elderly is kind of weird. You'd think that some of them lose their minds and not even know what the truth is anymore.

It's better not to think of these things because it is supposed to be a fun comedy. You're supposed to shut off your brain and enjoy this one but it's hard to do this when they bring up issues of morality and religion into the fray. That's what makes this movie quite awkward.

There's inconsistencies to this movie and it feels very uneven. There's also a ton of big stars in this movie that were just beginning to shine at the time. I felt a lot of them were underutilized but only because they didn't know the talent that they had at the time.

Overall, there was some fun to be had with this movie though the unevenness of this movie prevented me from having a good time. I love the idea and the potential of this movie but ultimately it didn't get to where it should have gotten to. I have to give this movie a 5 out of 10.