The Good Liar review: So many twists the film forgets to explain them all

Unfortunately, The Good Liar doesn’t really payoff. I don’t just mean that it can’t capitalize on all that it has going for it. The movie just doesn’t take the time to pay off one of the five stories it is trying to tell. It’s an unnecessarily complicated and downright unsatisfying film.

Ian McKellen plays Roy Courtnay, a con man well into his 80s. His scams are largely about duping people into fake investments. He meets widow Betty McLeish played by Helen Mirren and the two instantly strike up a friendship.

The friendship naturally blossoms into love, but not without the objections of Betty’s grandson Steven, who is a really strange character. He’s in grad school studying history. Presumably his school is in London, but he regularly goes to stay with his grandmother who lives at least an hour away. Also, he is really close with Betty, like the kind of close where you are expecting it to be revealed at some point that he is actually her much younger lover. (NON-SPOILER ALERT: That doesn’t happen).

Roy and his grifting cohort Vincent discover that Betty is worth somewhere around $3 million and immediately begin plotting to steal her money. There are so many twists and turns along the way that whatever story The Good Liar started out trying to tell is not the one that it is telling by the time the movie ends.

By my count, there are three major plots in The Good Liar and two subplots that all require some threads to be tied together to make them all make sense in the context of a single movie. That doesn’t really happen. For instance, while Roy’s grift is mostly investment scams, we are asked on two occasions to accept him as a brutally violent criminal. That is never really paid off in a major way though, so what we get are two little side journeys that really do nothing but help get the movie over Hollywood’s magical 90-minute runtime.

From the jump, it felt like The Good Liar got off on the wrong foot. The opening credit sequence is animated to look like everything is being typed up on a typewriter. It’s long. It’s loud. Ultimately, it doesn’t really serve a purpose other than to annoy.

There are so many things I want to pick apart about this movie, but they would require a heap of spoilers. I am not recommending you see The Good Liar, but I can’t stop you if you want to. If this is a must-see for you, I want you to experience all of the meaningless twists the way I did. It’s only fair, and really if anything about this interests you, you kind of deserve to suffer through it the way I did.

One last thing. Ian McKellen wears a mustache in this movie. No beard, no stubble, just a well-manicured, bushy mustache. There’s nothing wrong with it per se. It seems like an appropriate look for a British octogenarian. But it does make Ian McKellen look like an elderly Tom Hanks and that is weird. It sort of makes you wonder how much more entertaining the Lord of the Rings trilogy would have been if Tom Hanks played Gandolf, but played him with the same accent Tom Hanks used in The Ladykillers.

This is a weekend that comes with a lot of choices. Ford v Ferarri, the new Charlie’s Angels and The Good Liar are all new in theaters. Honestly, maybe the best move is to go see none of them and just stay home to watch football and Disney+.