ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Cody One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

skildude The show stops where it started. The horrible intro cartoon. Apparently they didn't have a budget to lead into the film gracefully or they took a time machine to 1962 or they needed the extra time to make the film go 90 minutes. Regardless, what a pile of crap. I've seem YouTube videos with more inspiring dialog, logic, and emotion. The entire film appears to have been filmed in a matter of days in a 1 block area. The thing they did was change the direction of the shots. I love how wounds changed shape, size, and location as the camera changed position. BTW a case of Monsters or the DT's and cameramen do not mix. perhaps the shaking camera was an homage to early Simpsons episodes. After all that we get an entertaining Matrix/Hidden Dragon moment in the Bar. It's as if they couldn't put enough crap in one film. Near the end of this travesty one can tell that Slater doesn't really care anymore and mails this bad boy in. His dialog is bad, his body just seems to not want to work in this turd of a film.One need only look at the Director of this flick, Tibor Takács to see why this is such a failure. Why he's directed such classics as Mansquito, Ice Spiders, Kraken: tentacles of the deep, and my personal favorite MEGASNAKE. How could he miss on this tripe with 2 actors that supposedly know how acting actually works? Maybe the cast just said screw it they've paid me, I cashed the check, and now I have to finish this, but I don't have to like it.

V J LIES & ILLUSIONS(2009) is a comedy thriller (using the term 'thriller' loosely here) which I think some critics and reviewers have taken too seriously. Perhaps they miss some of the dry humour. Nevertheless, I cannot see audiences queueing around the block to see this one, unless they are giving away free ice cream and popcorn to go with it. Best to watch it when it comes on TV. While I respect Cuba Gooding as an actor, Christian Slater's voice kinda grates on my nerves and he always seems to be reading his script off a prompt board.Wes Wilson (Slater) is a writer and he writes books about love - how to find your love, how to keep your love, that kind of stuff. He is engaged to a beautiful woman, Samantha (Sarah Ann Schultz - who I mistook at first for Kirsten Dunst) who is suddenly kidnapped by a bunch of thugs lead by Isaac Kahn (Gooding) and Wes is left lying in the car park dirt as they drive her away. But what do they want? They want diamonds. Seems Wes' fiancée has been leading a double life and poor old Wes knows nothing about it. Then he is called in to see her attorney and in one year's time, Wes will be entitled to all his fiancée owned which includes the house and the contents of a safety deposit box. How time flies. And soon the baddies are back.I think by the time you get so far into the movie, you might not care what happens next. You might be asleep.

callanvass Cuba and Christian Slater are two of my favorites. Despite a lot of the crummy DTV work they pull out these days, I was still somewhat excited of the releasing of this movie. Basically Lies & Illusions is a corny Action&Comedy film, with unfunny attempts at humor and a couple of decent actions scenes scattered here and there. Slater's character is quite hard to bare, and got annoying quickly, while Gooding is obviously slumming it in his bad-guy role. Lies & Illusions main problem while aside from being terrible, is it's obvious predictability. I saw the twist of Sarah Ann Schultz's character coming a mile away, and I didn't find the added sub-plot of Slater's character being torn between Schultz and Campbell that particularly amusing. The only scene I truly dug in this movie, had to be where Slater is doing his book signing, and Gooding asks him to sign his novel, that was a pretty effective segment.Performances. Christian Slater is annoying and unconvincing as the hero. He's usually fabulous in this type of stuff, but the script and his terrible character direction let him down. Cuba Gooding Jr. isn't any better. He doesn't convince as the baddie, and was often let down by the material. Sarah Ann Schultz is pretty but that's about it, wasn't impressed by her performance. Christa Campbell isn't particularly attractive or that convincing in my opinion.Bottom line. I can safely say you can skip this one. Look for better works of Slater and Gooding's, you'll be glad you did.3/10

nbrookes-783-309555 As other reviewers have indicated, I am posting this review solely to (hopefully) prevent others from making the mistake my husband and I did when we rented it - wasting 90 minutes of our lives (before we finally turned it off) that we will never get back.The trailers we saw for "Lies & Illusions" on other DVDs tricked us; the cover and description on the DVD itself mislead us; the premise sounded promising and full of potential; and - most of all - Christian Slater and Cuba Gooding Jr. as the two leads fooled us into thinking that this would be - at the very worst - a fun time-waster.It was a time-waster but it was not fun. It was like a "porno" without the porn, leaving only "o" or, more accurately, "0": zero, nada - no redeeming qualities.I had the same experience as other reviewers, wondering 15 or 20 minutes into it (after commenting to my husband about the high "cheese" factor) if maybe it was intended as some kind of parody, which would explain the strange James Bond soundtrack.But nothing could explain the dialogue. Lines like "I really appreciate you accompanying me on this journey." Who talks like that? And who says "Ow, my ribs", after they've been kicked in the ribs? My only hope is that this will become some sort of cult classic - like "Plan 9 From Outer Space" - as the worst film of the 21st century. It's possible . . .