This film asks you to imagine what it would have been like if Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had broken up their comedy team, not because they couldn't stand each other anymore, but because one of them killed a girl. It's an intriguing idea. Unfortunately, this movie never lives up to that promise. It turns into a pointlessly convoluted and almost laughably conceived "thriller" where poor Alison Lohman is hung out to dry in a starring role she's not ready for.

Vince Collins and Lanny Morris (Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon) are a famous show biz duo of the 1950s. Vince is the class and Lanny the scoundrel and they're rich and famous, lighting up movie screens and night clubs all over America. After performing a 39 hour telethon for charity in Miami, they fly to New Jersey to open up a new night club. That's when a dead girl from Miami turns up in Vince and Lanny's New Jersey hotel suite. 15 years later in the early 1970s, a young journalist named Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman) is looking to write a book about Collins and Morris. She's gotten a publisher to fork over a million dollars to get Vince to finally talk about their lives and careers and especially what happened to that dead girl. When Karen finds out that Lanny is writing his own book, she becomes even more determined to uncover the secret that Vince and Lanny have been protecting for so long.

The good things about Where the Truth Lies are that it has a nice amount of nudity, including lots of Kevin Bacon's bare behind for the ladies and some of the gentlemen, one really fine sex scene and superb performances from Bacon and Colin Firth. They essentially have to create multiple versions of the same men. They not only have to portray Vince and Lanny at the height of their talent and fame as well as on the downside of their careers and lives, they also have to show us Vince and Lanny both as they really are and the personas they hide behind when facing the rest of the world. They make you want to see more of Vince and Lanny as big stars of the 50s and make you feel sorry for them as fading stars of the 70s.

All of that, however, isn't nearly enough to overcome all the problems with this film. To start with, Alison Lohman does a poor job with her role. Karen O'Connor is a complex and demanding character that not only has to measure up to Vince and Lanny but has to carry a lot of the story all by herself. At this point in her career, Lohman is clearly not in the same acting league as Bacon and Firth. She gives Karen all the emotional depth of a teenage girl working behind a department story make-up counter. Lohman seems to have talent, but she has none of the skills needed for this sort of performance and becomes a void that drains all the energy out of the story.

For its own part, this story is overly complex and badly structured. There are dueling narrators and multiple flashbacks, different versions of the same events and totally unnecessary subterfuge. The murder of the Miami girl is barely referenced in the first half of the movie and then completely dominates the second half, creating different tones and paces for the two halves. And then there's the secret of the dead Miami girl. Oy. I suppose it might have seemed like a clever twist when somebody first came up with it, either writer/director Atom Egoyan or Rupert Holmes who wrote the book upon which this movie is based. It should have only seemed clever for 5 seconds, though, because it gets dumber and dumber and dumber the more you think about it.

Where the Truth Lies is skillfully directed and Bacon and Firth give appealing and layered performances, but the movie is fatally compromised by too many moments when you're watching it and thinking "You've got to be kidding me". This is one of those DVDs you see sitting on the shelf and you wonder why you haven't heard of it because there are some reasonably big stars in it. The reason why you haven't heard of this film and the others like it is that they're just plain bad. Instead of wasting money promoting it in theaters, these things are puked almost directly into video stores where they wait for some unsuspecting sucker to rent them. Don't be one of the suckers who rents Where the Truth Lies.

Egoyan's weakest film, at least since he came to prominence with Exotica. It's actually a somewhat interesting mystery, but it has a lot of flaws. There is a death, possibly a murder, in the hotel suite of two famous comedians (played by Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon), based on Martin and Lewis. That's the film's biggest flaw, that this completely fictional mystery uses Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis as a model. It's very distracting. The bulk of the story has a young journalist (Alison Lohman) writing the story of the two comedians, trying to solve the mystery. The film-making is pretty good, but Egoyan, except for The Sweet Hereafter, has always been a weak director when it comes to actors. Lohman, who was great in Ridley Scott's Matchstick Men, is awful here (she does get naked and have sex with a woman, though, which makes the film almost worth seeing). Kevin Bacon, who gave his best performance ever last year in the still underseen The Woodsman, isn't especially good, either. Only Firth does a good job. The film is also overscored with some very cliché mystery music. Mychael Danna's scores for Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter were brilliant; this one's a flop.