Too far fetched

Rating: 5/10 (25 February 2013)

The Illusionist is, like The Prestige, a movie about conjurers. These movies were made around the same time and both play around the turn of the 20th century. Where The Prestige succeeds, though, The Illusionist fails. In general, a script describes a series of events that should result in an exciting storyline with possibly an unexpected plot twist, so the moment you think the story is going to unfold itself in a certain direction, it suddenly turns and heads into another direction. That worked in The Prestige, it doesn't work in this movie. The twist was too far fetched. The scene where it all went wrong for me was the moment Inspector Uhl went back to the stable to look for additional evidence. The apparent fact that the scene of the crime was still untouched after all this time overstretched my willingness to believe in this script. Like beads on a broken necklace the remaining scenes of the movie lost all coherency. Also, the fact that the movie in the end needed a visualized thought-process to explain what we should have understood what happened all along, was too silly for words. And last but not least, the idea that "the bad people lived happily ever after" is not a good premise for a movie in this category. Still, I gave it 5 out of 10 for the way they visualized the old city of Vienna of those days.