The Prestige

The Prestige is this film about rival magicians, right, and they have this big rivalry because Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) totally ruined Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman)’s whole life back in the day when they’re colleagues working together on the same show and then Angier shot off Borden’s fingers during an act because apparently they are wholly (and repeatedly) incapable of recognizing each other when one of them is wearing false facial hair. There’s a lot of mysteriousness and people being injured in various ways and disloyalty and eventually everything gets explained and somebody gets the girl. (That was ambiguous, see, because the movie is ambiguous. I’m employing parallelism in this review. Awright.)

We’ll start with the good things about this movie so that I can have all the more fun being snotty about the bad things. Okay, let’s see. Well, the costumes are very nice, and everybody’s a good actor (especially lovely Michael Caine) even though they never alarm the viewer with an excessive amount of character development, and the sets are lovely and it’s fun to see magic done. And, um, Hugh Jackman does a good American accent. And Scarlet Johanssen is shexy.

Now, I had very high hopes for this film. I read that director Christopher Nolan (who directed the fabulous Memento as well as Batman Begins which I never saw because I hate Christian Bale) had asked reviewers not to give anything away because the film was going to be all like a magic trick, and I was like, Woohoo, this movie’s going to be awesome! There’s the awesome cast, and it’s just going to be so very awesome with the complex and fascinating awesomeness hoorayyyyyy! I saw The Illusionist and I was like, Well, that was good and all, but The Prestige is going to be SO MUCH BETTER. And although Hugh Jackman does a better American accent than Edward Norton does a whatever the hell he was doing accent, The Prestige was way not better.

Maybe I’m being unfair. But the thing is, there’s a huge set-up with all these mysteries and David Bowie, and you’re waiting for everything to be cleverly explained in a fabulous way, and the ending, when all is finally revealed, really feels like a cheat. The reason for this is, I think, that the film is set up as a magnificent and exciting trick, and it really isn’t. The ending’s just kind of blah. It’s not understated enough to be cool, and it’s not spelled out enough to be clear, so it ends up just feeling half-assed.

That said, I’ll go back to the positive things and admit that most of this movie is really very good indeed. I was thoroughly enjoying it until the last, I don’t know, ten minutes or so, and at one point I was so wracked with anxiety from all the suspense that I had to be physically restrained from looking up what was going to happen. So let me give credit where credit is due. I know it’s difficult to have as many balls in the air as this movie has and still catch every single one; but if it wasn’t going to do it properly it shouldn’t have done it at all. I was watching for all the little peculiar and unresolved details, and I knew they were all relevant and it was going to be so cool when they explained everything, and then THUD, they had an implausible (and thus much less chilling than one might like) science machine – I’m not giving anything away here, I swear – and a stupid cheating unsatisfactory explanation for Christian Bale’s much-vaunted trick. And no one lived happily ever after. The end.

(See how the first sentence of that paragraph is misleading because it pretends like I’m going to be nice in the rest of the paragraph? I hope Christopher Nolan reads that so he’ll know how I feel now! *stomps off in a huff*)