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Invention of Lying, The
EMAILPRINTWarner Bros. Pictures
Mixed or average reviews
Based on 31 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 51 votes
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Comedy | Romance
Written by:
Ricky Gervais
Matt Robinson
Directed by:
Ricky Gervais
Matt Robinson
Release Date:
Theatrical: October 2, 2009
Running Time: 100 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for language including some sexual material and a drug reference
Starring Ricky Gervais, Jennifer Garner, Jonah Hill, Louis C.K., Jeffrey Tambor, Fionnula Flanagan, Rob Lowe, and Tina Fey
The Invention of Lying takes place in an alternate reality where lying--even the concept of a lie--does not exist. Everyone--from politicians to advertisers to the man and woman on the street--speaks the truth and nothing but the truth with no thought of the consequences. But when a down-on-his-luck loser named Mark suddenly develops the ability to lie, he finds that dishonesty has its rewards. In a world where every word is assumed to be the absolute truth, Mark easily lies his way to fame and fortune. But lies have a way of spreading, and Mark begins to realize that things are getting a little out of control when some of his tallest tales are being taken as, well, gospel. With the entire world now hanging on his every word, there is only one thing Mark has not been able to lie his way into: the heart of the woman he loves. (Warner Bros.)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio SIte
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
In its amiable, quiet, PG-13 way, The Invention of Lying is a remarkably radical comedy.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
The performances are razor sharp. And the ideas in this movie are, no kidding, big.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
However cheeky and blasphemous, this is, at heart, a rather sweet little fable. Which of course would mean nothing if it weren’t explosively funny.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen
Gervais and Robinson take what might have been a cute concept comedy and elevate it to delicious heights.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Ricky Gervais, instead of resting on formula and on a familiar persona, uses his first opportunity as a big-screen actor-director to make an original comedy that expresses some real thinking and feeling.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
The cascade of ideas proves to be both pleasurable and frustrating. As the movie retreats into a happy-ever-after ending, even its outrageous lies seem more like little white ones.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Connie Ogle
Gervais' wickedly sly concept lingers quite awhile after the final chuckle. And that's the truth.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps
The film doesn’t traffic in drollery for its own sake. Between laughs, Lying uses its skewed reality to comment on our own need to create useful fictions to wallpaper over the abyss.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan
It's a fantastic high concept to wrap the film around, and Gervais comes close to fulfilling its potential, especially when he tells a comforting deathbed lie to his dying mother and accidentally invents religion.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
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.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
Gervais doesn't have movie-star good looks; it's his line delivery that has sex appeal.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Ann Hornaday
Like Gervais, the audience wants to see a struggle, which here comes down to whether unvarnished honesty or random acts of compassionate deceit will win the day. That alone makes for entertainingly high stakes.
Read Full Review >Variety Justin Chang
While it never tops the explosive hilarity of its first 20 minutes, The Invention of Lying is a smartly written, nicely layered comedy that, like last year's underappreciated "Ghost Town," casts Ricky Gervais as a mild-mannered schlub who manages, in spite of himself, to make the world a better place.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones
If anything, The Invention of Lying is too soft for the satirical promise of its premise.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
For its first stingingly funny half hour, The Invention of Lying had me thinking that Ricky Gervais had finally found a way to bring his indisputable brilliance at TV comedy (The Office, Extras) to the big screen. Then the air went out of the balloon. What a shame.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer David Hiltbrand
Invention - a mash-up of two Jim Carrey comedies, "Liar Liar" and "Bruce Almighty" - flirts with being a one-gag pony. Shocking sincerity loses its comic impact after a while.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
It's surprising to admit that the British comedian, known far and wide for his willingness to take risks, plays it safe in The Invention of Lying - a fault from which the movie never truly recovers.
Read Full Review >St. Louis Post-Dispatch Joe Williams
This topsy-turvy flick is fitfully funny, but more often it's just odd, like the first draft of a "Twilight Zone" episode that's missing its moral.
Read Full Review >Time Out New York David Fear
Once the sharp, clever satire gives way to what feels like a special must-see-TV episode, the movie’s promise slowly deflates.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Joe Neumaier
Once it's high-concept plot kicks in, Gervais' hilariously self-deprecating persona is really all that keeps it grounded.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey
The result is an erratically funny but often frustrating comedy, with an interesting premise hobbled by internal inconsistencies and uneven writing.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
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.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
The romantic plot, involving his unrequited loved for Garner, is soured by her character's unconcealed shallowness: she won't have him because his genes aren't up to snuff.
Read Full Review >Slate Dana Stevens
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.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
While the movie is a conceptual pip filled with quotable laughs and gentle pokes at religious faith at its most literal, it also looks so shoddy that you yearn for the camerawork, lighting and polish of his shows.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
Turns out to be a dour, shouty atheist manifesto. With a change of scenery it could have been called "Godless in Seattle."
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
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. (What director in his right mind would drop Tina Fey from the proceedings?)
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey
Ultimately it's the characters who are the joke -- too thin, too vacuous, too unlikable for us to care what happens in the next 30 minutes, much less for the rest of their lives. Too bad, really, because the truth is Gervais is a very funny guy. The ugly truth is that The Invention of Lying isn't -- funny, that is.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
In the spirit of that world, I cannot tell a lie: The Invention of Lying, which the English comedian both directed and wrote with Matthew Robinson, soon loses altitude and eventually falls flat.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Nick Pinkerton
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.
Read Full Review >Empire Chris Hewitt
Proof that when you aim for the stars, sometimes you find a black hole. Hopefully just an anomaly for the usually wonderful Gervais.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 5.1 (out of 10) based on 51 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Danlo Z. gave it a0:
Extremely disappointing, in so many ways.
Ade C. gave it a4:
Gervais is perfect in the role. It's a lovely idea but not compelling enough to last 90 minutes.
Jeff L gave it a7:
Excellent writing. The gag at the center of the film doesn't get tired - it keeps developing. The ending drags slightly, but overall this is a good movie with a big heart at the center.
Logan St. Cloud gave it a0:
I've seen a couple of Ricky Gervais' comedy routines and I'd always thought he was a pretty funny guy. I saw the ads and trailers for this movie and I thought that it seemed like a pretty unique and original idea so I went into this movie with decent expectations. Now to be fair, I didn't read any of the reviews for it because, quite honestly I hate reading reviews beforehand and having the plot of the movie ruined, which is why I have made sure not to include them in this review. The moral of this movie is that you shouldn't judge people so quickly; which is what really aggravated me so much about it. You see, I'm not an overly religious person like a lot of the folks that have posted reviews here, but I was incredibly offended by what I saw in this movie. The movie started off with a few decent laughs but then went downhill fast. A significant portion of this movie was directed solely towards a ruthless, sacrilegious, mean-spirited attempt to sell people on atheism that added in no way to the story and served only as a cheap attack against religions. I did read the warnings that they have in the previews though and I'm not an easily offended person. I saw it mentioned that there were references to drug usage and sexual innuendo, it ended there and it really shouldn't have. If they had simply said that this is what this picture was about or that it had contained these elements, then I don't think as many people would have went to see it or have felt so upset at it. It just amazes me that in this day and age we would sooner bow down to the wishes of terrorists who are upset with seeing the words of the Koran or the image of Muhammad, rather than having even the tiniest bit of sympathy for the freedom of religion that this country was founded on. I respect the studio/producer/director/writer's rights to free speech, but if that's the primary message of the movie then you should really let people know that beforehand. Of course that would cut down on the amount of money that they would willingly take from the people they are mocking here, so I don't expect that to happen anytime soon. To those who are wanting to compare this on a religious level to movies like "The Golden Compass" and "The Chronicles of Narnia", allow me to clue you into a few things. First, the reason why "The Golden Compass" fared so badly didn't have anything to any religious connotations, it was because the movie was so incredibly BAD. I've tried watching that movie three different times and have yet to stay awake throughout the entire film. Second, "The Chronicles of Narnia" is NOW a classic in children's literature and while the same may be said on a certain level in regards to "The Golden Compass", it was nowhere NEAR as well known before the movie came out and even if there never HAD been a film of Narnia, it would probably still be more well known that that load of crap which is "The Golden Compass". BUT when Narnia was first released, it wasn't widely accepted by members of the Christian religion because they believed that rather than it being an homage to the crucifixion of Christ, it was a blasphemous portrayal of it. And to those wishing to change this from a simple reviewing of the movie itself and to a debate on the validity of atheism vs. religion as a whole, allow me to remind you of one simple thing. Beyond the questioning of faith and beliefs, and despite the atrocities that have occurred in the name of religion, without religion humanity would have taken a FAR less civilized route than the one it did. Religion was the basis of morals. Morals were the basis of laws. Without religions to set guidelines common sense dictates that we would have had no reason in which to act moral and consequently would most likely be still clubbing each other over the head, and that's if there would still even BE a human race at this point. TO ANYONE WHO'S ALREADY PAID TO SEE THIS MOVIE: YOU CAN TAKE YOUR TICKET STUB BACK TO THE THEATER TO GET YOUR MONEY BACK. PERSONALLY THOUGH, I'M TAKING THIS ONE STEP FARTHER AND FILING A COMPLAINT WITH THE STUDIO ITSELF.
Mark G gave it a4:
A massive disappointment. Saved from a 3 by the last 40 minutes where I did laugh a few times; for the first 30 I didn't at all. The basic premise is sound but (as the Empire review mentions) this film confuses a world where people cannot lie with one where people are speak unsolicited and blunt truths; the former could be funny but the latter is absurd and very unfunny.
Claudine C gave it a0:
What happened? I really liked Ghost town - and I like Ricky Gervais, but I feel like we all paid an offering into Ricky's Church offering basket by going to see this movie.
stuart l gave it a6:
Enjoyable film, and very touching in places. The one joke did drag for a little while, but as the story started to develop this became less tiresome. I would agree that Jennifer Garners character is not exactly likeable, she really doesnt show much kindness at all aside from her obsession about genes, which is a bit confusing,. I also have a suspision that alot of the bad reviws are from the likes of religious types. Id like to remind them that the story is set in "another world" as gervais clearly states at the beggining where people cannot lie. This doesnt mean it is set in our world, no one can lie so there is no religion because all religion is based on a story. The film is fantasy. Please grow up.
