A fabulously bad thriller called Deception features preposterous dialogue, dim-bulb acting and a needless array of exotic international locales. It’s so awful that the filmgoer can relax early on in the assurance it will only get much worse.
Andie MacDowell, whose acting range is limited at best, is Bessie Faro, hassled housewife with three young children. She doesn’t want to believe that her husband Johnny (Viggo Mortensen) is dead. But when his teeth arrive in a special delivery box, what loyal spouse would doubt it?
To give Johnny a proper burial in Mexico, where he was incinerated in an airplane crash, Bessie heads for Veracruz. She visits the local office of the family airplane salvage business and makes a surprising discovery under the desk – a stack of her husband’s old baseball cards. Each one is marked with what appears to be a code.
It is inexplicable how Bessie figures out that the cards lead to a series of bank accounts around the world in the names of the baseball players. But confident in her hunch, off she goes.
Somehow she is able to get away with signing for the money as, say, the wife of Manny Sanguillen. In the Bahamas, she’s Mrs. Orlando Cepeda and in Athens, Greece, Mrs. Milt Pappas. She only seems stumped by the baseball card for Bill Mazeroski. Where next? Poland or The Czech Republic?
The point is that the bank tellers simply hand over stacks of pesos, drachmas and deutsche marks. Bessie is rich and no one’s the wiser, except for two men only shown from shoes to knees as her pursuers.
Listen closely for pointless dialogue that does little to reveal character or advance plot. When Bessie confronts a stern German manufacturer of ink, he says, “Ink is the lifeblood of a civilization.”Later on Bessie spouts this non sequitur, an oblique reference to a food shipment by a relief organization: “Nobody eats ink, especially with a shipload of grain coming their way.”
Helping in her search is lost-looking Liam Neeson (soon to star in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List) as an Irish do-gooder named Dr. Fergus Lamb. He heads Feed the World, committed to wiping out starvation. To find the answers Bessie needs involves a bribe to Miss Hakim, an Egyptian bureaucrat whose “mother was frightened by an ostrich.”
There is perverse pleasure to be found in such a relentlessly ill-conceived movie, if you’re in the right mood. With a retread-sounding score by composer John Barry, Deception leads Bessie to this hardly heart-stopping conclusion: “I know one thing – dead men don’t write checks.”
