Let's watch middle-aged men talk for 2 hours! That sounds SO fun!

Rating: 1/10 (17 December 2008)

There is something Quentin Tarantino always says that I couldn't help apply to The Prestige. In a lot of interviews, he mentioned that most movies anymore aren't even stories, but rather a single circumstance that the director just lives up to for two hours. And that's exactly the problem The Prestige and every other Nolan film has. Nolan just takes one boring concept, then attempts to stretch it out into a long-winded, boring movie by use of his watered-down metafiction directing style. If The Prestige would have been the idea of any other director, they would have at least added SOMETHING to the one-track story or cut it down to half the time so it would have at least been slightly less tedious to sit though.
The Prestige opens up with the single least interesting first hour I've ever witnessed in a film. Is there anything whatsoever that was even remotely meant to hold my attention? From the severely uninteresting opening, the movie tries hard to redeem itself with a middle "twist" that is too shallow to be called a true plot twist. Simply put, it's a weird sci-fi insert and nothing more. I have nothing against that, but one semi-interesting plot point can't save a pointless movie from being pointless. By the predictable ending, all the scenes that made no sense before make sense. I assume this is a style Nolan finds clever, but it got old after Memento. In The Prestige it's simply annoying, if not a bit childish. It's used here as a way to force an uninteresting plot into something that is watchable by indulging the viewer in cliché mystery. And I predictable and analyzed everything I just said above in the first ten minutes alone. Ironic, isn't it, that Nolan tries so hard to unpredictable but the very storytelling method he uses gives himself away. Christopher Nolan is a lot like an immature little kid trying to impress an old magician with a cheap coin trick. It's amusing and cute at most.
The other main problem with The Prestige is it lacks anything whatsoever even slightly original. The one-line plottwo dueling magicianshas been used in everything from multiple CSI episodes to cartoons like Scooby Doo to old classic horror Hitchcock Presents episodes. The sci-fi insertI won't spoil what it ishas been done before in other movies time and time again. The dramatic scenes are all as cliché and predictable as possible. All the fanboys who are calling The Prestige even remotely original really make me laugh.
The acting is decent on all fronts, and sometimes borders on cheesy when some of the actors forget their accents half-way through. The directing is somewhat stylish, but nothing that held my attention or is anywhere above average.
But above all, the main flaw is by far the fact that 2/3rds of the entire movie is irrelevant to the plot or to anything whatsoever. It's just a bunch of old men repeating the same lines about magic tricks over and over to the point of nausea. I don't have the strongest attention span, but I can certainly sit through a slow-paced movie when the slow pacing actually has something to do with the story. For example, the original 1970s Alien had a complete hour of seemingly irrelevant screen time, but it used that to build atmosphere. Here, in The Prestige, you have an hour and a half of screen time devoted to nothing but hearing old men talk about things that make no difference. It doesn't build atmosphere; it bores. I was already screaming, "Does it EVER end?" at the screen before I was even halfway through, and that is simply ridicules.
Overall, The Prestige is a completely pointless watch because you've seen it all beforein half the time. It's cliché, painfully boring, and ultimately pointless: all staples of Christopher Nolan's film making.
0/10