To begin like so many others have, that this movie has to follow Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige is about as unfortunate as Infamous following Capote, or to a lesser extent the way in which Tideland has ultimately kinda wallowed in the shadow of Pan’s Labyrinth. Sadly, unlike those two underdogs, for me this is nowhere near as compelling as its precedent, to the point where I almost zoned out entirely midway.

While the production design, cinematography, and Philip Glass’ score (even if it does sound way too often like his score for The Hours played on strings) are practically perfect, it can’t hope to compare in my eyes to the abstract, the pure cinema, of Nolan’s movie. I have to say, though, bad as Jessica Biel looked at this year’s Oscars to me, and knee-jerky as my immediate reaction is to her, she’s not so bad here. It’s Rufus Sewell who stands out like a sore thumb, in an almost hilariously bad performance – in a single shot towards the end his accent manages to go through Scottish, Welsh and Russian in matter of seconds, lol.

Now I feel like I need to apologise if it sounds like I’m simply getting down on this movie just because I loved The Prestige so much – it really wasn’t my intention, I wanted to love it as much as anyone, and in the end, this movie contains enough moments with Edward Norton onstage that can only be described as magical to keep it at a solid 4-star rating no matter how bad it gets when the magic is set aside in lieu of story time. But I know which one of the two I’ll be watching more in the future, alongside my Tideland and Infamous.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 4:30 am in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.