Music and Visuals not enough

Rating: 6/10 (6 March 2020)

I enjoyed the music and visuals of The Illusionist, but they were not enough to overcome the slow, plodding, seemingly meaningless march to the Big Reveal, which turned out to be completely incredible anyway. There are many questions which could be asked about this story--why the obsession all of a sudden after fifteen years, why should we care about any of the characters, why should the inspector want to befriend the magician, etc.--but the one truly insurmountable problem remains: why would the couple hang around in Vienna having once gotten away with their caper? That makes zero sense to me. The ending was a surprise, but I nearly turned this off before getting to it. ¨What could the point possibly be?¨ I kept asking myself. And then came the highly unsatisfying answer to the question.