Ab-ra-cadaver

Rating: 1/10 (28 November 2006)

Fans of truly great bad acting, crushed birds, bogus history, boredom, bogus science, preening smugness and amateur amputation -- this idiotic flimflam is for you.
And if you thought mining or bridge-building was a dangerous game around 1899, think again. Stage magic was apparently fatal or, at last, crippling for nearly everyone involved -- especially if you were an assistant or a canary. Might have been a sound move to avoid using blind (I am not making this up) stagehands.
Playing tricks on the audience is as old as film -- perhaps the medium itself should be seen as one big trick -- but this is so clunkily done and so much is signalled in advance (just one example of many -- closeup of rope, medium shot of distraught woman, closeup of rope again, then, abracadabra, silhouette shot of human pendulum -- and watch out for anyone with a limp and of being hit over the head by repeated, blatant examples of duality).
Except for Caine, Serkis (maybe) and the feline Bowie, the performers of these very unlikeable characters are cringingly inept with Hugh Jackman taking the marzipan for playing multiple roles so astoundingly badly that you wonder if he thinks great acting consists of SHOUTING while crying and, possibly, having your nose run (or was that yet another tear?). After all, I suppose, if you can't be childishly histrionic at your own wife's funeral, what's the point of turning up? And as the out-of-work actor (if only!) Jackman seems to be doing an outrageous send-up of Robert Newton (not known for his own under-playing, I think).
If the idea of such cardboard cutout characters battling over who is the greater not-very-inspired magician seems a bit thin, well, you might be on to something -- at more than two hours this is wildly overlong as well as overwrought. It is also a bit hard to care who wins the "duel" (or how) if you think each is a boring, revolting, homicidal creep.
Even the magic business is supposed to be entertaining from time to time but these guys aren't just magicians, they're psychics and so know all about tricks like Sawing a Woman in Half which, as Chris Priest knows, was invented by an illusionist called Selbit and not performed until 1921. (According to the author the dueling magicians' story ends in 1903.)
And where does the sadomasochism come from? With all the gloating over gore, violent death and grime, you'd think Mel "Mad Monk" Gibson had had a bloody hand in this.
Yet all this grimness is so very silly -- no sense of period; no sense of the theatre or of how magicians actually work; no point of view; no sense of time (which does, probably, have a kind of inexorable reality); above all, not a trace of irony or humour (though some in the audience I was in laughed when one of the ridiculous Hugh Jackman characters fell down). I suppose, though, it is rather comical if the great (offstage) villain is Thomas Edison -- in fact, he may be the Moriarty here, the Napoleon of Crime -- let's hear it for direct current.
There may be an interesting movie to be made about the business of magic in the late 19th Century theatre -- but this is definitely not it. It's a typical Hollywood mess which says nothing new, makes not a whole lot of sense and assumes (perhaps correctly) that the audience is a pack of clods. The novel (as usual) makes more sense than the movie which is (as usual) the mucked-up, dumbed-down version of part of the story. While you can't set a whole novel on film (though there have been some interesting attempts) you don't need to turn it into some sort of crazy, inept pantomime set in a mortuary.
Many of the changes/"improvements" are inexplicable -- why, for example, is Rupert Angier now Robert? Murdoch-phobia?? Some are crudely for US consumption -- you try putting a pre-decimal English penny in a pistol and see how far you get!
And it's full of unsubtle tricksiness such as "AB" (Alfred Borden) "RA" (Robert Angier) "C" (Cutter - no first name? Like Sabu or Paladin?) and for all I know there may be a "DA" "BR" "A" lurking somewhere - but by now who cares? This is the sort of thing that seems clever to people who don't get out too much.
Perhaps someone could re-edit this dreary rubbish to transform it into a real movie; cutting out (or dubbing with a human voice) any character mugged by Mr Jackman might be an excellent starting point.
But I would much rather have listened to Cutter talking the illusion business over with Tesla -- especially on precisely how you deal with the blood and the noise when you smash a live bird on a table top or how you can produce all that Tesla lightning without deafening performers and audience with Tesla thunder.
Is The Illusionist any better?