What Went Wrong: Deception
By Shalimar Sahota
June 20, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
“I went through hell with this movie,” says director Marcel Langenegger of working on Deception. He had a limited budget, a reduced shooting schedule and was filming with an unfinished script. “Everything worked out, but it was crazy.” Having previously directed commercials, Deception was his first, and so far only, directorial venture. Originally called The List and then The Tourist, the script was penned by Mark Bomback, who also wrote Live Free or Die Hard. When the film went into production, Jason Keller and Patrick Marber were also both listed as writers, though once it was released any work they did went uncredited.
While working late in New York, overworked auditor Jonathan (Ewan McGregor) is interrupted by lawyer Wyatt Bose (Hugh Jackman). They begin chatting and build up a friendship. One day while meeting for lunch they both have their mobile phones (accidentally?) swapped. Since Wyatt mentions that he’ll be in London for a few weeks, Jonathan isn’t going to get his phone back anytime soon. Jonathan then receives a call from an unknown woman asking him if he’s free tonight. He says that he is and then meets the woman at a hotel, where they immediately go into a room and have sex. The following morning, Jonathan realises that Wyatt is on a sex club list, and so decides to use his phone to meet more women. He soon meets and falls in love with a mysterious blonde (Michelle Williams). During their second encounter she suddenly goes missing, and Jonathan becomes a suspect in her disappearance.
An interview with Joblo had Langenegger revealing the trouble he had to go through in order to get the film made. He was attached to the film for four years, and it didn’t really get off the ground till Hugh Jackman became involved. “I land Hugh Jackman. I meet him, he wants to do this part,” says Langenegger. “The script gets re-written and then he liked some of my ideas and resolve was good.” Jackman was then cast in Baz Lurhman’s Australia, leading Langenegger to believe that the film was now off. However, after the start date for Australia was delayed this created a window of opportunity for Langenegger. “‘Can you shoot me in four weeks, all of my parts, including everything?’” recalls Langenegger of a phone call he had with Jackman. “And I said ‘Yes.’ And then he said, ‘But we have to keep the original start date,’ which was October. And it was already August. We only had about five weeks to prep.”
Langenegger had to raise funds after 20th Century Fox pulled out, though they still distributed the film in the US. Jackman’s production company Seed Productions (a subsidiary of Fox) helped in financing the film, with Jackman credited as one of the many producers. “We had six or seven producers on the film,” says Langenegger. “They all hated each other. They all fought with each other and made things so difficult.” The film was shot over 44 days, with Langenegger having just one month to shoot all of Jackman’s scenes. “We had less days and less money then you cannot go over,” recalls Langenegger, “so the pressure was enormous.”
Most probably the biggest issue was the script itself, which was in the process of being rewritten while they were filming. “There were days when pages got faxed onto the set that we’d see for the first time,” says Langenegger. This might also explain the clunky dialogue. A cringe worthy highlight is Maggie Q’s small role as Tina, the one who introduced Wyatt to the sex club and explains why she wants to bed him, even though she finds him terrifying. “You know when it’s so good you’d rather die than stop?” It’s at this point where you say out loud, “Um… no.” Yet she continues and says, “You wanna kill someone. You wanna kill the person you’re doing it with.” Also, when Langenegger initially read a draft of the script, he said, “It doesn’t really make sense that Wyatt would steal the identity of a guy he frames for murder.” He’s absolutely right, yet it’s strange that this fault still comes across in the final film. Not a good sign when after everything is revealed you start counting up the plot holes.
“The hard thing was to shoot the last act,” says Langenegger, for according to him, it hadn’t even been written yet. “When the movie was at Fox it had a Fox ending, like really typical kind of Fox ending with two guys on top of a rooftop of a skyscraper fighting each other. Hugh Jackman wanted to change it, I wanted to change it, and then we had kind of an idea of a double identity switch and then, that wasn’t written. In the end we had nobody writing this ending.” The one filmed is slightly drawn out and isn’t great. Wyatt and Jonathan are in Spain withdrawing $10 million each from a bank account Wyatt set up, after having forced Jonathan to wire transfer money from an investment firm he audited. They go to a park where Wyatt draws a gun (which we’re also supposed to believe he had when in the bank), only for Williams, the mysterious blonde, to suddenly appear and shoot Wyatt. It just makes you wonder how bad the original ending must have been.
The other problem here is the old Spanish Prisoner trope, and if you’ve no idea what that is then you might actually enjoy the film even more. It’s been updated here to incorporate a sex club, picture messaging and wire transfers, while also borrowing elements from the likes of Vertigo, Dressed to Kill, Double Indemnity, Body Double, Bad Influence and Derailed. That’s all okay, but the issue here is if you’ve grown up on these kinds of films then you don’t even have to second-guess the plot, for after 45 minutes you already know what the outcome will be.
The film didn’t even have a trailer till just over a month before it was to be released. None of the main actors were available to promote the film. Langenegger explained that Michelle Williams did have interviews and photoshoots lined up for various magazines. “All the shoots and interviews were supposed to happen January/February [2008], and then Heath Ledger died and she cancelled them all.” He also revealed that Ewan McGregor was doing a play in London and Hugh Jackman was filming X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Langenegger criticised Fox over the marketing, saying, “Fox put so little marketing into this film. Fox is all about Hugh Jackman. They don’t care about anybody else.”
Fox decided to label Deception as an erotic thriller, which probably turned just as many people away. Maybe it’s the whole ‘sexually repressed’ thing, or maybe people had their fair share of such films from the 1990’s. Also, those who were swayed by the erotic angle would realise after watching that it really isn’t, with only one ‘actual’ sex scene in the film.
Made on a relatively low production budget of $25 million, with the hot star power of Hugh Jackman, Ewan McGregor and Michelle Williams, surely the film could have at least recouped its budget back? Released on April 25th 2008, the reviews for the film were absolutely awful, describing the film as incoherent, silly and unthinkably bad. Opening at 2001 locations, Deception entered the US box office at #10 with a paltry take of just $2.3 million. The film ended up with just $4.59 million. Internationally, it fared a little better, taking $13.14 million, but overall that meant a total gross of $17.7 million. Oh dear. The film was a flop.
Fair play to Langenegger for taking the opportunity to make a film that might still be in development hell, but the rush job has resulted in Deception coming across as a late night TV movie, one that happened to get a big screen release due to the major stars involved. It also looks like the studio had more control of the film than Langenegger did, while getting a decent script finished in time appeared to be out of Langenegger’s control altogether. It’s possible that a better film was there had Fox shown a little more courtesy and time. The resulting film suffers from a worn out and wholly predictable premise.