Directed by: Bill Condon
Starring: Helen Mirren, Ian McKellen, Russell Tovey, Jim Carter
It is our pleasure to witness Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen onscreen together as a con man and his next mark, an elderly former teacher who isn't quite the pushover he expected. Mirren and McKellen make The Good Liar much more palatable than the material. However, the movie trudges towards its inevitable ending, one which doesn't surprise us because it is telegraphed by holding onto shots of certain characters a moment too long.
Someone in the movie has to be a liar, because the title gives it away. The Good Liar opens in 2009 with Roy (McKellen) and Betty (Mirren) agreeing to meet in person after connecting on an online dating site. Both use false names, and each confesses to using pseudonyms, but that is just the beginning of the deceit for Roy, who in his twilight years is a con artist who bilks unsuspecting people out of hundreds of thousands of pounds with fraudulent investment schemes.
Betty has a nice home in the London suburbs, and quietly has stashed away nearly three million pounds in her accounts. Roy ingratiates himself into staying at her home and plots his next move with his business partner Vincent (Carter), who pretends to be a financial analyst. Betty and Roy become companions, although hanky panky is off the table per Betty, and they travel to Berlin where part of Roy's shady past comes to light thanks to the research of Betty's ever-suspicious grandson, Steven (Tovey). Steven smells a rat from the beginning, and his voiced concerns are promptly dismissed by Betty.
We're set up for a thriller with twists, and I won't reveal those twists, except you can see them coming from a mile away. There is no other way for The Good Liar to end, so it isn't a question of how it ends, but why things play out as they do. When The Good Liar is over, we see one good liar, one better one, and a movie which isn't satisfying enough for either.
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