Atrocious acting, preposterous plot, sadly not a joke

Rating: 1/10 (25 January 2012)

'Prestige' starts as Jules Verne and ends as Star Trek on a bad day.
Atrocious acting: Ever heard of 'Mummerset? It's the word used to describe the ridiculous accent that actors use to indicate they're from the English countryside, the sort of 'ooh-arr' sound that Robert Newton makes in 'Captain Blood'. In 'The Prestige', the ridiculous accent used is 'Mockney', the one actors use to sledgehammer that they're from London. Luckily for Michael Caine, he was born an East Londoner, but the rest of the troupe in this pile of tripe look and sound like they're auditioning for 'Eastenders' (a dreadful UK soap), trying to out-gorblimey each other.
Caine does his usual reliable turn as the worldly-wise buddy who's powerless to stop things going wrong, as seen in 'The Man Who Would Be King'. And go wrong they do. When David Bowie is the actor giving the best performance in your movie, you're in trouble. The interchangeable cardboard magician's girl assistants do not manage the transition from TV acting to big screen at all.
Caine once did a TV 'masterclass' about screen acting, the upshot being that you shouldn't blink in closeup - note how all the other actors fail to observe this rule, and it shows Caine was right.
Preposterous plot: The movie opens with the death of Jackman, where Bale is on Death Row for his murder, and is told partially in flashback to when Bale and Jackman are rival magicians. Bale, for some reason he can't remember, contrived to cause Jackman's wife to die in a trick, so that naturally Jackman is obsessed with revenge. He's also obsessed with discovering the secret of Bale's 'Transported Man' trick, where the magician instantaneously moves from one side of the stage to another. Now at this point, about an hour in, I thought I'd guessed the ending. Jackman has to hire a double in order to pull off Bale's transportation trick; the only problem is that he ends the show beneath the stage while the drunken, stroppy double gets all the applause. (Somewhere along the way, Jackman acquires a wooden leg, which appears overnight, but doesn't seem to inconvenience him beyond a slight limp). Of course, I thought - Jackman eventually gets the double to perform the 'Pledge and Turn' (the opening premise of the trick), so that the double is the one who gets drowned in the tank placed below stage by Bale. I was wrong. We are eventually asked to switch from a reasonably atmospheric period melodrama (think 'The First Great Train Robbery') to schoolboy science fiction. Jackman, at vast expense of which we get no explanation, buys a cloning machine - yes, a cloning machine - from real-life distinguished inventor Nikola Tesla (Bowie). Every time he performs the trick, Jackman dies and is cloned back to life, in the traditional 'Star Trek' transportation manner. What? WHAT? Just as well Tesla's machine didn't work, or he'd be back to give Christopher Nolan a piece of his mind.
Sadly not a joke: if 'Prestige' were even just a little tongue-in-cheek or camp, you might be able to feel that your intelligence was not being not just insulted but placed in the stocks and pelted with rotten vegetables, ordure, and pseudo-science as seen in ads for hair conditioner. No, 'Prestige' is deadly serious about itself as a history lesson and as a drama. Starting as Edgar Allen Poe meets Jules Verne, it ends up as Doctor Who meets Star Trek, and it's a train wreck. A terrible film.