Every face on screen seems wrong for the part chosen in "Where the Truth Lies." With apologies to Alison Lohman, her high school pout is all wrong to play dogged journalist and deceptive seducer Karen O'Connor. As much as I like Kevin Bacon in almost any movie, he spends much of this film searching for the right accent, and seems to know he's too sharp and menacing to play the goofy half of an old-fashioned vaudeville duo. And Colin Firth, well, he makes for an interesting British stiff in most movies based in England, but transported to America he just looks bored.

Egoyan adapted the plot from a novel by Rupert Holmes, though his flashes between time periods are distracting and not clearly delineated. The "present" of the movie is the early 1970s; Lohman is a budding magazine journalist offered the chance to write a tell-all book about the comic duo of Lanny (Bacon) and Vince (Firth). Lanny and Vince were supposedly the Martin and Lewis of their time, wildly popular and living the high Rat Pack life.

Confusing the matter, and us, is that one of the partners seems to be writing his own account and sending it to Lohman; she reads it aloud as voice-over, and we never really know what she has learned on her own and what version of the story she is following.

confusing us, Lohman's character as a child appeared with Lanny and Vince during their final show. The fact that she now chases them as an adult may be even kinkier than the mystery.

Egoyan spends a lot of energy re-creating the 1950s variety-show craze, and the mobs and bimbos that clung to most stars; he adds even more wardrobe energy to the bad collars and unfortunate turtlenecks of the 1970s. Perhaps he was avoiding the unfortunate fact of Lohman as lead: She makes the least convincing journalist since Geraldo Rivera. She sleeps with one of the duo, apologizes to the other, accepts his offer of a new drug and joins him in a ménage à trois. One pill makes you dumber, indeed.

The deep dark secret behind the girl's death is obvious to the point of audience mirth. We've lost interest long before Lohman's character gets there. Meanwhile, Bacon has displayed his abs and rump a half-dozen times, and eventually we wish Firth had kept even that tasteless turtleneck wrapped tightly around his torso.

It's an awful mess, if that's not redundant by now. Here's hoping Egoyan writes it off quickly and finds another budget for a better idea. He's certainly worth following, and it's likely "Where the Truth Lies" will become a one-off to miss in his growing repertoire.

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