What can compare with the white-knuckle suspense of uploading a file? "Deception," that's what. This is a movie jam-packed with all the thrills of watching that little progress bar grow and grow until it fills the allotted space in the pop-up box on your computer screen.

The most thrilling sequence in the movie actually does involve a race between a disconnect countdown and a file upload on accountant Ewan McGregor's IBM laptop. If you had a lot of rhythmic, percussive music blaring away while you were transferring files on your laptop, you might find it exciting, too. But maybe not.

"Deception" ostensibly trades in the title commodity. Meek, bespectacled auditor Jonathan McQuarry (played by McGregor) meets suave, predatory lawyer Wyatt Bose (Jackman) in a conference room late one night while the office cleaning lady and the office cleaning gentleman sneak off into the men's restroom to polish each other's linoleum.

"Are you working late, or are you downloading a multitude of porn?" Wyatt asks. He whips out a joint and the unlikely new best friends smoke away the evening. Jonathan confesses that he likes the order and symmetry of numbers, yet he sometimes looks out the high-rise glass windows of whatever firm he's auditing and he sees "life literally passing me by."

But when Jonathan accidentally picks up Wyatt's cell phone after an intimate lunch in the park, he finds himself on a do-call list that would be the envy of every nascent Eliot Spitzer. Hot Wall Street babes begin calling for anonymous sex at snazzy New York hotels. Once he gets into the groove, he takes to sexual moonlighting.

If you check out the definition of the word "deception" in a dictionary you'll find that it involves duplicity, a ruse, a trick. And therein lies the trouble with this movie. O "Deception," where is thy deceit? "Deception" contains not one credible moment. Not one. Not a line, a gesture, a look, a staging, a situation, a location. Nothing. Even Madrid is unconvincing as itself -- and it's Madrid!

- by Jim Emerson Universal Press Syndicate