Find The Lady

Rating: 6/10 (3 March 2007)

I've been looking at the first few comments on this and it seems clear that they are the work of 1) the easily satisfied and/or 2) people who are not regular movie-goers or readers of mainstream fiction and thus have no knowledge of The Prestige, The Princess Bride or Carter The Great, all three of which touch on/explore the same themes as The Illusionist. Even an unsophisticated kid watching a movie in the forties or fifties knew that if one of the two leads was killed off halfway through it had to be a scam (though they would have said 'trick' or 'ruse' in those days) so how anyone in the 2Ist century can accept the death at face value is beyond me.
Much has been made of the setting but for me this was a major disappointment; we tend to associate Vienna, especially fin-de-siecle Vienna with opulence and glamor yet this whole film was shot with a touching concern for the light bill so that even the few scenes in daylight were somehow gloomy. Apart from the illusion factor the most interesting thing was the cat-and-mouse between Norton and Giametti with the latter turning in the best performance by a mile. All too often Sewell was reduced to chewing the scenery like an anorexic Charles Laughton whilst Biehl is a graduate of the Scarlett Johannson School of Empty Chocolate-Box acting and failed miserably to generate even a spark of chemistry with Norton. This isn't the same as saying that the thing isn't watchable because it is, just about, but beware: You may wind up disillusioned.