Liar Liar

Directed by Tom Shadyac, Liar Liar follows successful attorney Fletcher Reede (Jim Carrey) as he’s left without the ability to lie after his neglected son (Justin Cooper’s Max) makes a magical birthday wish. It’s a high-concept premise that’s employed to entertaining (yet progressively erratic) effect by Shadyac, as the filmmaker, armed with Paul Guay and Stephen Mazur’s screenplay, delivers a briskly-paced comedy that relies heavily on Carrey’s unabashedly (and occasionally overbearingly) broad performance to propel the thin, overly familiar narrative forward – with the inclusion of several laugh-out-loud bits of silliness going a long way towards compensating for the hit-and-miss vibe, ultimately. (It’s impossible, for example, not to get a kick out of Fletcher’s efforts at telling a simple lie about a blue pen.) And although Shadyac has elicited compelling work from an eclectic roster of periphery players, including Cary Elwes, Jason Bernard, and Maura Tierney, Liar Liar progresses into an increasingly inconsistent second half that suffers from a distressing dearth of genuinely hilarious gags and bits – which does, in the final analysis, cement the picture’s place as a decent-enough endeavor that feels like it could (and should) be so much better.

**1/2 out of ****