In the Proverbs of All Nations, 1824, T. Fielding wrote: “A little wit, among foolish people, will pass a man for a great genius”. In The Invention of Lying, 2009, R. Gervais writes: “A little lie, among truthful people, will pass a man for Jesus”. Nearly, anyway. For whilst The Invention of Lying is, as the title suggests, about lying, it is also a critique on religion. Late in the film his character even grows a beard, sports some sandals, and wears a duvet as a robe. Because he’s like Jesus, you see. It’s clever; subtle.

The basics: Mark Bellison is a short, fat man with a stub-nose. He lives the ordinary life of a short fat man with a stub-nose, splitting his days between a lonely apartment and his job writing historical readings of the 14th century for television. Mark lives in a world where the concept of lying hasn’t been invented, so no one – not bums on the street, not co-workers in the office – is too burdened by pleasantries to refrain from reminding him just how unattractive and unsuccessful he is: that short, fat, stub-nosed loser. Hopefully you haven’t gotten tired of that short, fat and stub-nosed bit, by the way, because it’s a joke they’ll revisit like they’re pumping a dry well.

In between jokes rooted in repetition rather than humour, Bellison discovers – nay, *invents* – how to lie. In time honoured, hackneyed cinematic tradition, he uses his new found ability to rob a casino, get laid, and have a nice little montage of making people feel better with just a whisper in the ear and a wink of the eye. Each of these things has been seen in just about every film ever made, of course, mostly with a pace and verve absent here, but still the little screenwriter hamster wheel keeps on turning, lest whole pages of script have to be filled with originality.

The end game to all of this lying is Anna (Jennifer Garner), Mark’s dream girl and occasional SD-6 operative. Like everyone else, she dismisses Mark as hopelessly genetically-incompatible; that stub-nose again, naturally. They go on a date as a matter of routine, but his small-talk falls on deaf ears, with Anna spending much of her time pre-emptively dashing any hopes he might have of a goodnight kiss. She’s as unimpressed by his simple means as she is his appearance, is as rude as we all are in our heads, yet Bellison spends the next 90 minutes trying to win her over. She’s a bitch only within the conventions and rules laid out of by the film’s premise, but even discounting that it’s hard to see why he becomes so infatuated. Maybe he just really liked Alias?

His infatuation has him setting off to improve his life and the world at large, so as to win her heart. About here the film comes to a juddering halt, taking a detour from being simply unfunny, into being an even less-funny, ham-fisted and obvious sleight on religion. Ironically, the problem with being the only person who can lie is that everyone believes you, so when Mark tells his dying mother that she doesn’t need to be scared of a pain-free afterlife full of love, she believes him. As do her doctors. And their friends. And soon the whole town is at his front door, looking for answers from a bible yet to be written. You can fill in the blanks for what happens next, but if your musings conclude with him standing on his doorstep with two tablets of commandments, then you wouldn’t be far wrong. Your version would be funnier though.

Small mercy can be found in Rob Lowe, perfectly cast as the chiselled Brad Kessler, Bellisons rival in the race for Anna. He is every bit as smarmy as you quietly suspect Lowe just might be, and is the closest the film comes to a villain to rally against. All of the other characters are hopelessly underdeveloped, and cameos throughout – most painfully from Gervais’ cohorts, Stephen Merchant and Shaun Williamson – threaten to completely break any suspension of disbelief. Why is Edward Norton here as a cop? Or Philip Seymour Hoffman as a nothing bartender? I can only presume the producers have a dossier on each of them entitled Equestrian Adventures in Hollywood, because I can think of precious few other reasons why they would waste their time.

Ricky Gervais is an often great writer, but his even greater ambitions are ultimately his downfall. The Office was a wonderfully observed shows, full of cutting humour about the mundane and routine. But his ventures into Hollywood have all collapsed around his inability to exist outside of the world he came from: no matter how hard he might try, he will always be that boy from Reading. He can’t carry a movie. and last year’s equally mediocre Ghost Town proved that. Even his limited roles in the two Night at the Museum films stretched his abilities to breaking point, and given his co-stars were a Tyrannosaurus Rex and Dr. Mark Sloan, that’s a pretty sorry state of affairs.

An inverted ‘Liar Liar’ ten years after the fact, The Invention of Lying is as far from a must-see as it’s possible to get, a film that doesn’t need to exist, full of actors who deserve more. It is the very definition of unremarkable and unrecommendable. Well, I *could* recommend it solely on the basis it isn’t actually terrible, just as I *could* recommend it when taken in consideration with other films in the cinema at the same time, most of which are undoubtedly worse. I could even recommend it on the basis that you may just get a couple of laughs from it, and emerge blinking into the daylight with some sense that hey, maybe the world we live in isn’t as bad as it seemed before I went in. I *could* do all that.

But I’d really hate to lie to you.