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“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.

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