Surprise ending?.... Not so much

Rating: 6/10 (2 January 2008)

Finally saw "The Illusionist" and must start by saying that I had previously seen "The Prestige" and it's nearly impossible to speak of one without mentioning the other. Anyway, The Illusionist was an acceptable movie, but not one that will stay with you beyond the first viewing. Not an awful movie, per se, but nothing felt fresh about it. Sloppy, bizarre accents from everyone in the cast (couldn't they even fake an Austrian-inflected English accent?) Ed Norton is on autopilot, Rufus Sewell yells a lot, Paul Giamatti delivers and to my surprise Jessica Biel was actually quite good. If you've heard any of Phillip Glass' music this sure won't surprise you. The whole thing just felt contrived and obvious. Actual line: "Why don't you just leave him?" "It's not that simple"... Now there's an original sentiment. The ending was obvious from about 30 minutes into it, then they spent 3 minutes with the requisite montage with all the "clues" that we missed even though it's a shock to no one that !gasp! she faked her death. Yawn. What really got my goat was that all of the "magic" was really jangly CGI that looked horrible. The one decent looking trick was the ghost thing which A) was impossible and B) the filmmaker made absolutely no attempt to explain. If he could perform an amazing illusion like that, you think he could come up with a better way of escaping the prince than spilling some fake blood and knocking some rubies off a sword. On second thought, this movie stinks. Don't even bother.