Customer Reviews

Lies & Illusions

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(35)

 

 

I was in the video store and saw a cool looking action suspense film in the new release section called "Lies and Illusions" starring Christian Slater and Cuba Gooding Jr. OK, OK, I realized it was some straight to video B flick because I'd never heard of it, but I figured, "hey, good cast! How bad can it be?" Boy, how the mighty have fallen. The first third feels like a watchable low budget indie flick and isn't too bad. Then they must have run out of money. At this point the shot-on-location story inexplicably moves from Seattle to Spokane of all places and the actors stop even trying. My wife and I were in tears laughing by this time. The unchoriographed fight scenes between out-of-shape actors with no martial arts training looked like middle aged Power Rangers on Methadone. As it gets progressively worse toward the end, better quality diologue could be found in a porn movie. Then to top it off, there's a plane crash at the end that looks straight out of an Ed Wood movie. If you see this on the shelf, be a good samaritan and remove all copies and hide them so nobody else gets subjected to this.

I am being quite generous giving this awful movie a one star rating! This movie is unbelievably bad! I cannot believe that Slater and Gooding Jr. did not read the script and laugh out loud at the ridiculous plot and cheezy one-liners! The entire film, the acting, the music, the sound effects, the script, had the effect of an adult movie, and lets be clear, the aformentioned categories are not what people watch adult movies for! My wife and I watched the entire movie, and I really now scratch my head and wonder why! I watch a lot of movies, and I can honestly say, I cannot remember when I last saw a movie that was this bad. Even if this was made for TV, there are many, many good made-for-TV movies. This one clearly doesn't make the cut. The acting is atroscious, and the worst offenders are Slater and Gooding Jr.!! It is hard to believe that these two have actually been in good movies! The sound effects, gun shots for example, are laughable!
I cannot believe this movie is $19.99!! Do not waste your money, or your time.

This movie is just awful in every way. Don't be fooled by the two name actors. It's an embarassment of script, direction, acting, soundtrack, editing, and just about anything else you can imagine.

Shame on Slater and Gooding for appearing in such a dog of a movie..

Its almost unwatchable the acting is so terrible..

This is the very bottom of the heap for movies I have seen..

Don't waste your time on money on this travesty of a movie.

On paper, this movie has an interesting premise. An award-winning author of a relationship book (Slater) has his fiance abducted on the night of his book's big promotional party, and after a year passes with no trace of his beloved it becomes clear that she was hiding a lot of important secrets, not the least of which being a small alcove in their garage which is filled with weapons and high-tech gadgetry. Suddenly Slater's writer finds himself hunted down by gangsters and diamond thieves, led by an unflappable and horribly overacted Cuba Gooding.

Others have said it before, and I'll add to their claims: not even in a schmaltzy ironic way is this movie worth watching. Everything about it is disasterous. Slater's amazing author has one of the worst written acceptance speeches I've ever heard. The vicious gangsters make incomprehensible decisions. The gun fights are so poorly framed, directed, and edited they seem like jokes. The fight scenes are filmed chaotically, so that the actors and actresses don't have to do any fancy footwork, but this means they also make little to no sense. In one fight scene, inexplicably, the combatants decide to jump up on tables and engage each other from off the floor.

The acting, the plotting, and the special effects aren't even amateurish, because that makes it sound like someone, somewhere was actually trying when they made this film. Not so. Every single person involved in this mess of a movie seems to have done a half-assed job, and the only resulting illusion is the very idea that this thing is even remotely watchable.

My boyfriend and I rented this last night, never having heard of it before but so curious to see Gooding and Slater in action together. All I can say is - "SIGH" and "WHAT WERE THEY THINKING"...........

Bad movie overall with dubious plot and poor acting (and you have to realize, I've always been a big fan of Gooding and Slater). And that bit with the "recipes for troubled couples" was just so ridiculous and unnecessary. Was it all meant to be funny? Seriously, did I miss the joke and timing of the movie altogether?

Sadly, a good couple of hours of my life I'll never get back again.

It is movies like this that make me think I will never rent another movie without reading a review. The best part of this movie was reading all the negative reviews after the fact. Some of them are hilarious. Thank you reviewers for being the bright spot in this movie experience.

As I watched this atrocity - feeling my brains cells commiting suicide by the dozens - I wondered how such a piece of garbage could actually get produced. Christan Slater should be banned from ever acting again and Cuba Gooding Jr. should stick to acting retarded like he did in Radio. This celluloid nightmare made me ashamed to be a human being for the simple fact that a child could have made something much more entertaining. This movie should be shown to deathly ill hospitial patients who are yearning for a quick euphanising.

I guess if any good can be said it is the laugh we have had at how awful the one liners were such as..."I've never seen my own blood"...Slater's acting was deplorable, the writing was worse, and the effects -- if you could call them that -- were a complete joke...amateurs could do much better than this...I can't believe it had these two big names....I won't fall for that again.

Gak! I stopped watching after a half-hour and thank goodness it was a rental. It's not only an obvious plot, but even the bass playing was a rip-off.