Lie Hard (2022): Comedy is Wasted on Modern Audiences review

Lie Hard is goofy in a way that I haven’t seen since being an impressionable Elementary school aged kid watching too much HBO. A thin comedy with limited stakes, but totally in love with its premise? Yeah, I can get behind that.

Hell, I grew up in a time where an actual film centered around a GLAD garbage bag sweepstakes had a summer movie release. Don’t believe me? Watch the damn trailer below!

Million Dollar Mystery is now on Blu-ray from Kino, but let’s get back to Lie Hard.

What is it about? Well, Lie Hard is a fun romantic jaunt about a young man with a lying problem. After talking himself up to his lady love’s parents, he decides he has to go into debt to buy a mansion. But, what he does to get that done puts him into $4 million in debt.

VOD has been having a boom since COVID and is thriving long after those first waves. Director/star Ian Niles is great in the lead playing against people like Big Sally and Brick, but I can see why Lie Hard might not connect with people. It’s not a fault of the production, but more an underpinning of our times. What does that mean?

Unreliable narrators and liars have been making fiction fun for ages. When taking that methodology into the world of light comedies, you have to realize that the fantasies of older comedies doesn’t gel with a modern world. Why? Well, it’s because we have driven fantasy out of our stories in favor of pushing realism.

Even when Lie Hard goes out of its way to be realistic, there’s something about the way it’s shot and staged that feels like every other modern comedy. Again, it’s the politics of aesthetic getting in the way of the plot. Not a bad thing, but it’s one of those nagging issues that makes your brain twitch.

So far a few outlets have discussed Lie Hard and the ones that come at the film from a negative standpoint only reinforce what I have found. It’s hard to have goofy things like a broad female mob boss and clueless goons. The ability to read basic cues and see anything past the surface level has been forced out of modern audiences. Even at the cost of whimsical comedies about the goofy junk we do when we’re in love.

Having originated out of the Film Festival circuit, I was expecting Lie Hard to have more of a broader response. I was shocked when I found none. Most of the talk around the film seems to be in the lead-up to the Digital release and it feels like a missed opportunity. But, what does it all mean?

At this point in Cinema, we’re at this odd relationship with comedy. The audience and creators are trying to be smarter than what each expects. But, most mainstream audiences can only read what’s on the surface of a comedy, a film or even an off-hand comment. My only negative comment on Lie Hard is that the premise seems more suited to a sketchy comedy show segment rather than a feature film.

After all, there were many times throughout the film where it felt like the material had nowhere else to go. Guy is a doofus, his girl loves him and he has to make peace with everyone trying to break him. If you can’t see yourself hanging with that premise, you’re not going to enjoy Lie Hard. If that doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world, give it a shot.

Lie Hard premieres on VOD and Digital on August 16th