D

The title alone should indicate that things aren’t as they seem in “Deception.” And the movie isn’t what it claims, either. It’s supposed to be a clever thriller with twists that will surprise and entertain. Unfortunately, the plot turns are predictable well before they happen. And director Marcel Langenegger presents them in so sluggish a fashion that they turn the whole thing into a snoozer of the first order. Hugh Jackman, who co-stars with Ewan McGregor, was one of the producers of the picture, and though it’s not quite the disaster that his short-lived television series “Viva Laughlin” was (it’s far too sedate and tedious for that), it’s just about as much a misfire in its own way.

With a picture like this it wouldn’t be fair to reveal too much of the narrative, even if it’s unlikely to catch you unawares. Some of you, after all, might still be inclined to catch it even after getting word about how bad it is. But it’s hardly spoiling anything to say that “Deception” begins with Jonathan McQuarry (McGregor), a mousy accountant doing an annual check of the books of a prestigious New York firm, being befriended as he works late one night by slick, jocular lawyer Wyatt Bose (Jackman). Before long they’re sharing lunch, playing tennis together, and going to clubs, despite the fact that Bose is an obvious ladies’ man and McQuarry—note that name!—the exact opposite.

The plot kicks in when the two men accidentally exchange cell phones just before Wyatt’s departure for a job in London. Jonathan gets a strange call on Bose’s line—a woman asking him simply if he’s free that night and giving him an address to come to—and since he’d been unable to correct the impression that he wasn’t Wyatt, he goes and finds a woman waiting to bed him. It turns out that Bose is in a sex club whose members meet anonymously via such contacts; and with his friend’s okay, McQuarry continues using his unofficial membership. In the process he meets a beautiful blonde called S (Michelle Williams), who’d earlier entranced him on a subway platform, and soon both of them have abandoned the club rules that prohibit personalizing the process and falling in love, and they’re making goo-goo eyes at each other over Chinese food.

At this point the plot changes trajectory in a radical way, just as McQuarry begins a stint at another important firm. I won’t reveal the precise twist, but it should already be evident from what’s preceded. After all, what would a bon vivant like Bose see in a wimpy doormat like McQuarry? For that matter, what would the spectacular S see in him? When you answer those questions, you’ll have no difficulty foreseeing their motives, at least in the most general way. Nor, given the clumsy fashion in which it’s staged, will you be bamboozled by a plot turn involving a death, or by the concluding confrontation. It isn’t that the elements of Mark Bomback’s script don’t fit together: they do, if you take the trouble to parse them and are willing to accept that many of them are highly implausible if not impossible. But they strain credulity to the limit, and since they’re laid out so lethargically you may be too bored even to try.

Perhaps the effect would be different if the actors brought more to the party. But under Langenegger’s prosaic helming, McGregor’s timidity quickly grows boring (and a last-act transformation is thoroughly unconvincing), and Jackman’s gruff virility almost as dull. (Perhaps he should doff that producing hat, or at least decline to appear in his own productions.) Williams is pretty but uninteresting (she also has a last-act character change that’s hard to believe), and Lisa Gay Hamilton, as a police detective, just does a standard-issue tough-gal routine. Charlotte Rampling impresses in a cameo as one of the sex club dames, but Natasha Henstridge—though willing to undress before the camera—doesn’t, despite her attributes. Technically the picture’s glossy, with Dante Spinotti’s cinematography using the office settings well and excelling in a few foreign sequences (though elsewhere it’s less sensitive), but Christian Wagner’s editing could have benefited from some punching up.

The result is that as a thriller “Deception” isn’t deceptive or thrilling enough; it’s like a puzzle that one can put together all too easily, and that, when finished, doesn’t reveal much of value. It is a real mystery, though—as in a mystery why it was made.