Slick ‘Deception’ can’t stay on track

By Roger Moore

Thanks to Hugh Jackman, it’s always watchable.

It isn’t the deceit that sells “Deception,” an intriguing new thriller that abandons that intrigue for a messy and unsatisfying finale. It’s watching Hugh Jackman turn some of that lethal charm of his loose on a villain, a smooth, sexy, seductive and dangerous guy who wears a suit a little too well to be trusted.

Ewan McGregor stars as Jonathan, a shy, lonely accountant, a guy who can’t even “meet somebody” at work because he’s an auditor, the person who drops in on businesses, goes over their books and makes the few people he meets there uncomfortable by the very nature of the job.

And you’re not picking anybody up in a bar by telling them how much you love numbers, “the order of it, their symmetry.”

Which is why he blurts an awful lot of personal angst when the slick, backslapping Wyatt (Jackman) reaches out just a bit. Well, that and the pot they share after-hours.

Next thing Jonathan knows, he has a friend, somebody he can hit the bars with, meet on the tennis court. Next thing we know Jonathan and Wyatt have mixed up phones, and “no game” Jonathan finds himself caught up in “the List,” a casual sex club for the rich, the confident, the well-connected.

“No names, no rough stuff, no talking business,” just a phone call from another member, an “Are you free tonight?” and a no-consequences roll in the four-star-hotel hay with the likes of nameless women with healthy sexual appetites, women played by Natasha Henstridge (“Eli Stone,” “Species”) and Charlotte Rampling (“The Verdict”), whose character tells him “it’s the intimacy without the intricacy.”

But when Jonathan meets up with this pretty young thing he saw on the subway (Michelle Williams), the casual turns complicated. He’s smitten. He wants to break the rules. He wants to date her. Of course that’s the very moment she disappears and he’s sure some harm has come to her and wonders how Wyatt may be involved.

McGregor plays this guy with the stooped posture of a loser, and a convincing American accent. His face gives away Jonathan’s despair. Jackman, on the other hand, is the very picture of a guy who isn’t a salesman, but sure is selling you something.

The charisma just oozes from the man in this performance.

Williams is almost as surprising, letting us inside a woman who is first a lonely flirt, then a sexpot.

She lets us watch her melt just a little in the presence of this man she met the wrong way and for reasons her mom wouldn’t approve of.

It’s a pity the movie kind of goes off the rails in a chatty, explain-it-all (long after we’ve guessed it all), drawn-out finale.