The Invention of Lying starts out amusingly–not side-splittingly funny, mind you, but amusing enough. An ordinary man bumbling about his ordinary town, Mark Bellison (played by Ricky Gervais, who also wrote and directed, together with Matthew Robinson), is, by his own estimation, a bit of a loser, and intriguing only in that he inhabits a thought-provoking (and laugh-inducing) alternate reality.

His is a world in which human beings outright cannot lie. In this completely truthful world, there’s a lot of brutal honesty coming at him–all pretty entertaining and, for the purposes of comedy, quite harmless. On a date, Anna (Jennifer Garner) tells him, point-blank, that she finds him startlingly unattractive. His secretary Shelley (Tina Fey) tells him outright that his boss has promised to fire him by the next day–as early as today if he can muster up the courage.

But then something happens: Mark, jobless and alone, walks up to a bank teller and tells her there’s more money in his bank account than there really is–and she believes him. He alone has discovered the ability to lie.

The story from there is enjoyable enough until about half an hour in when Mark, eager to ease his frightened mother’s dying hours, tells a big lie: that after you die, you spend a happy eternity in a place called heaven. And hence we’re set up for what is, from that point on, one of the most unfunny funny movies ever made: a comedy about religion, and how we’re all just kidding ourselves.

Equally unsettling is that the world presented as “truthful” is one in which everyone is both supremely shallow and, frequently, unfeelingly mean. A world where women only care about having cute babies, and men only care about one-upping one another and touching women’s breasts. Is it meant to be heartening that luckily, thanks to the invention lying, we can all pretend to have a little more depth?

Add to all of this the film’s weird fixation on Mark’s weight and his “snub nose,” and you start to get movie that’s difficult to decipher. The premise seems to be that Mark’s looks are the only thing preventing Anna from marrying him; in all other respects she thinks he’s great and even admits to loving him.

Mark, for his part, doesn’t seem to mind Anna’s infuriating superficiality; neither does he mind that it wasn’t until a bit of money and power came his way that she even gave him the time of day. Not helping matters is their complete lack of chemistry and history–aside from a hasty line in an early scene about how he has loved her for ages, the film never bothers to even explain how they met.

None of which is to say The Invention of Lying is a waste of time. You won’t regret seeing it, and it’ll certainly make you think. But though this film may bill itself as comedy, don’t be fooled–after all, ours is a world that knows how to tell a good lie.