I was expecting a lot more from this film. Part of that had to do with Ricky Gervais, whom I would expect to produce SOMETHING funny to match up all the hype I've heard about him (I could barely finish the first episode of The Office, which was hilarious in American), but the rest was the premise, which they could have done a lot with. Other depictions of people comically unable to tell a lie or restrain the truth are very funny, as are creative and exaggerated deceptions, so theoretically this could have been a great premise. However, it seems these two types of comedy work when shown in contrast - the truth-tellers are funny through the contrast to all the accepted forms of untruth and discretion we take for granted, and likewise the liars are funny because we are in on the joke.

Instead we have this horribly bleak world, which is supposedly the same as the real world except there is no such thing as untruths or even fiction (movies consist of a man sitting in a chair reciting an historical lecture). According to the movie, this means that everyone says exactly what is on their mind and tells everyone every little thing. Apparently, in the minds of the writers, if you can't lie, you also have no imagination, discretion or shame. A voice-over in the beginning explains that people in this world might seem harsh because they can't tell white lies, but it really goes too far. And what they appear to be throwing out as hilarous frankness comes across as pathetic and disgusting. A woman casually informs her date when he arrives to pick her up that she didn't expect him so soon and she was masturbating. I can see where this MIGHT have been funny in a Farrelly brothers movie, but even Jennifer Garner's attempts at perky cheerfulness fall flat at delivering this line and you are left uncomfortably squirming at the monotone blandness of the scene which seems to rob even that statement of its humor or even shockingness. You feel vaguely sorry for the characters that they live in a world so deprived of innocence or wonder that they are completely indifferent to words like that. In addition, the complete openess of every character makes the nice ones seem stupid, but is not enough to get the jerks a pass. The main character with his werewolf teeth and whiny, pathetic demeanor can't even elicit sympathy in a world where most people's inability to lie translates as treating him with bald-faced contempt.

In addition to the horribly unfunny, implausible and bland world, we are treated to a Message. The Message is not what would seem obvious from previews or the beginning of the movie, and when it was introduced, it was a bit of a surprise. The central humorous concept promised in this film was, after all, that no one has any experience of falsehood or lies, so the first person to lie could get away with anything - except he does not, aside from lying about his bank balance when making withdrawals and selling the first work of fiction to a movie studio. So the Message is introduced when the protagonist's mother is on her death bed in the hospital (and he seems to be seeking some sort of false reassurance from the hospital personnel in complete contradiction to what his entire life experience would have been in this world), and she is afraid of dying and no longer existing. The main character uses his newly acquired and unexplained power to lie to reassure her. Basically, he invents the idea of Heaven and tells her as she dies, so she is at peace for the last few moments. When it happened, I thought it odd and yet another error in verisimilitude. "This isn't realistic" I thought. "There are other people in earshot, and everyone in the world believes everything they are told. If someone could tell such a story, and have everyone believe him, it would have major, world-changing implications and such an occurrence would be significant enough to deserve its own movie! How can they go back to the main story of this one, with such a dramatic change in the setting left hanging?" D'oh! That became the new premise of the movie! The word spreads from the hospital with the doctors and nurses who overhear him telling everyone the great news about the mansions you get to live in when you die, and a crowd gathers outside his house to demand answers about the afterlife. From there he invents religion, saying that there is a man in the sky who made everything and causes everything to happen, and we get a sort of sixth-grade-intellectual-level parody of religion, and religious ideas, presented in a way that rephrases them to sound ridiculous. I do this myself quite a bit on the WoTMB, but come on! This has been done to death about religion for thousands of years! It wasn't saying anything new or phrasing it in a new way as to seem ridiculous. People use the same phrases this movie uses, only in a taken-for-granted, derisive, manner. An atheist or secularist might scoff at religious who 'take orders from an invisible man in the sky' but they don't make those words the centerpiece of an argument or even as throwaway jokes, let alone climactic punchlines! We are then treated to montages of the main character reveling in the fame of being the only one with access to the Man in the Sky, interspersed with mock headlines and magazine covers which are a pale shadow of the typical fare of The Onion. The Onion rephrased all this years ago and in far mroe subtle and sardonic ways!

While I hold religious beliefs myself and am strongly resentful of consistantly anti-Christian humor (particularly when it is juxtaposed throughout our culture with admonitions to be respectful of other belief systems), but I can appreciate when it is being funny, even if I find the extent or tone offensive. I could not even bring myself to care about this movie's point. It was like being physically assaulted by a three year-old. You can't take it seriously, and it is so ineffectual it borders on pathetic, so you can't even be upset at the hostility fueling it. And it is nothing that has not been said! One could at least argue that movies such as Kevin Smith's "Dogma" had funny jokes or brought a different perspective to a concept, or was courageous in standing up to a popular institution (though I notice no one who is not trying to make a reputation in the first place has the balls to make fun of Allah or Islam), or at the very least, was a well made movie (I have never heard anyone, for instance, suggest that Michael Moore is a BAD filmmaker, no matter how politically prejudiced or dishonest they call him)!
Calling a movie about the invention of religion "The Invention of Lying" is about as subtle as it gets, and there are ham-handed sight-gags, like the protagonist writing down his ideas for the after-life and the man in the sky on a couple of pizza boxes, and then holding them to look like Moses with the 10 commandments, or hanging around depressed in a bathrobe and letting his hair and beard grow so he is supposed to resemble Jesus. As an anti-religon movie, "The Invention of Lying" isn't even Atheism 101. It's Remedial Atheism, for Atheists who are too lazy and uncritical to actually BE Atheists! Seriously, anyone who is going to go against the grain enough to assert an Atheist belief (otherwise you're just an undeclared agnostic), HAS to be too rebellious, contrary and critical to accept and enjoy this movie. As far as comedy goes, it makes Jim Carey's "Liar Liar" look like a masterpiece of subtle social commentary, and "Epic Movie" look like "Some Like It Hot."