The Four-Faced Liar

The Four-Faced Liar has a marketing problem. The tagline reads, “a comedy about drama.” Nothing could be more misleading. This movie is more like a drama that occasionally pauses to tell a joke. Good times are not found within.

The Four-Faced Liar is about terribly boring couple Greg and Molly who move to New York. They swiftly get absorbed into the social circle of Trip, a womanizer, his girlfriend Chloe and Bridget, a lesbian who Molly develops a close friendship with. You can probably see where this is going. Molly and Bridget’s friendship eventually leads to an affair and said affair leads to serious angst. Molly must make the ultimate decision between Greg, who is passionless but safe and Bridget, the exciting unknown quantity.

The Four-Faced Liar mostly fails because it fails to walk that fine line of dramedy. It’s too quirky to be truly dramatic but far too depressing to be a comedy. Any film that involves relationship issues stemming from an attempted drunken sexual assault is too dark to be called a comedy. It should have gone farther in one direction or the other. As it stands, it awkwardly straddles both genres which leads to a movie that’s successful as neither comedy nor drama let alone a blending of the two.

The performances in The Four Faced Liar are actually pretty damn good. However, even excellent acting can’t save a script as poor as The Four-Faced Liar. I do hope that this uneven movie will help these actors achieve films that are more worth their acting potential because they really did their damnedest with every line they were given.

Too serious to be a comedy and too quirky to be a drama, The Four-Faced Liar instead languishes in some sort of purgatory that makes it not enjoyable to experience. Even the good performances from the cast can’t save the fact that far from being both a comedy and drama, The Four-Faced Liar ends up being neither. More than anything, The Four-Faced Liar is a disappointment.

Overall rating: 3.8/10

Other WLW films in similar genres