The Invention of Lying

A premise beaten to death for ninety minutes by Ricky Gervais. A world where lying doesn't exist, until one day Gervais lies to prevent himself from being evicted and has an epiphany. Thereafter he's a lying machine. There is an unexpectedly moving scene halfway through where Gervais lies to his mother on her deathbed. Gervais' plump, comic face turns sad and pathetic as he tells her that she'll reside in a mansion and everyone she loves will be waiting for her in the afterlife. He is surprisingly affecting here. Unfortunately, he is overheard and soon all of humanity is hounding him for details about eternity. Since everyone believes everything he says, in desperation, he attributes all this new found knowledge to a "Man In the Sky" that runs the world and speaks to him personally, which leads to one of the only good jokes, a newspaper headline that reads "Man in the sky continues giving AIDS to babies." Bottom line, this just isn't funny, and the actors are lost as to how to play their parts, everyone seems brain damaged. In the place of laughter or wit there's at least a dozen celebrity cameos to pass the time ("Oh look, there's Edward Norton"..."Oh look, there's Phillip Seymour Hoffman") And lots and lots of clumsy musical montages, I counted six!