In 1980 the public stayed away in droves from John Landis's The Blues Brothers, written with Dan Aykroyd, who starred alongside John Belushi. A mixture of car chases and fifties and sixties American rock songs, the film did not, however, disappear into celluloid limbo, despite being dismissed by critics as a brainless exercise in overspending with not a
trace of wit or ingenuity. It became a cult success as a film and as a stage show. Now Landis and Aykroyd have come up with a sequel, which is much the same as before, except that Belushi is now dead so we get John
Goodman instead. It has a great soundtrack, but is in the end a little like material recycled once too often.
The Pate brothers' Liar is one of those too-clever-by-half films which ends up vanishing up that orifice I will refrain from mentioning, this being a family newspaper. It is certainly ingenuous, occasionally visually striking, and well-acted. Tim Roth as John Wayland, a rich young man who may have murdered a prostitute and dismembered her body, and Chris Penn and Michael Rooker, as the
ill-assorted cops with secrets of their own interrogating him, play it for all it is worth. Wayland allegedly suffers from frontal lobe epilepsy, which may explain his odd behaviour, but because his symptoms were made up for the film, this renders pretty well everything we see gobbledygook. The surprise twist at the end works, but makes nonsense of all that has gone before. The Pates clearly have talent, but it requires better material than this. They have only themselves to blame since they also wrote the script.
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