Conman and love have fuelled movies for decades. Think of the cross-dressing shenanigans of Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, or the mixture of family and cons in Paper Moon, Matchstick Men and the incestuous, dark noir of The Grifters. There's something about the tension between deception as a way of life and the necessity of honesty in everyday life that intrigues.

FILM DIRECTORS: Glenn Ficara, John RequaCAST: Jim Carrey, Ewan McGregor, Leslie Mann

Based on a true story, I Love You Phillip Morris is the story of compulsive conman Steven Russell (Carrey) whom we meet as a cop, happily married to Debbie (Mann) and singing his heart out on Sundays in a church in Georgia. He's also gay and when a car accident puts him in hospital, he resolves to live life out of the closet and moves to Florida, gets a boyfriend and commits insurance fraud to fund his new-found lifestyle.

In prison, he meets and falls in love with Phillip Morris (McGregor) and when they get out of the nick, they move in together. Steven gets a job using false pretences and unbeknown to Phillip, cheats his new employers out of significant amounts of money. He gets caught, Phillip gets upset, and Steven makes a million attempts to get out of jail and back to his soulmate only to create more havoc and end up making him his cellmate.

For a while now, Jim Carrey has been trying to tone down the excessive slapstick and zany rubber-faced antics that made him famous in the 90s. Believing in this film enough to take a pay cut, Carrey gives a decent performance but, like the film, it soon starts to slip and lose direction. There are some good set pieces - a broken-telephone dig at conservative Texan business golfers and the ingenuity of Steven's prison escapes stand out - but the idea that you can fake Aids is, perhaps, less appealing.

A little flat on the romance side, the film doesn't entirely convince that this is a story worth telling. While understanding the necessity of getting stars on board for fundraising purposes, casting gay actors in the roles of gay men may have better served its dramatic cause.

Ficara and Requa have certainly made a breakthrough in producing a mainstream film that treats a homosexual relationship with the same appreciation and candour as standard heterosexual romances. But, the film has suffered from conservative prejudice, resulting in many US distributors refusing to carry it, a decision that makes it worth seeing as a protest against middle-American tunnel vision, if not for the jokes about blow jobs.