KEY POINTS:
Verdict: Memento director pulls off lavish but cumbersome brain-teaser which keeps you guessing longer than it keeps you caring.
As a display of cinematic sleight of hand, The Prestige is as clever as pulling a top hat out of a rabbit.
It's a structural wonder of a film with a chronological juggling act telling, in its topsy-turvy way, of two magicians in late 19th-century London whose friendship turns to rivalry and escalates to tragedy.
That the many wheels-within-wheels of plotting produces such a fiendish narrative to navigate is perhaps no surprise - director Christopher Nolan was behind the backwards brainteaser Memento, as was his scriptwriting brother Jonathan. Here they've adapted Christopher Priest's novel set in a late Victorian era where the worlds of music hall and H.G. Wells have seemingly collided
But as much as The Prestige impresses to the point of exasperation with its storytelling wizardry, it's still without much of a heartbeat. For a film about love, betrayal, obsession, revenge, magic and murder, it sure has a way of not letting all that passion get in the way - or engage anything but the detective intellect - of delivering its next perplexing twist.
The dangerous competition is between Hugh Jackman's American natural showman Robert Angier and Christian Bale's gloomy but technically brilliant Alfred Borden. The pair start out together but a tragic accident sets them on their own paths and into a bitter rivalry, which has both men trying to sabotage the other's tricks.
That's until Borden develops an illusion called "The Transported Man" which Angier can't crack and leads him to the snowbound laboratory of Nikola Tesla (Bowie), the real pioneer of electromagnetism and the AC current, here rendered as a not-quite-mad scientist who seems to have pinched either Mr Van der Graaf's generator or Dr Frankenstein's defibrillator.
There are further complications between the conjurers in the form of Scarlett Johansson's alluring assistant who does her best to heat up proceedings in her best bordello wear, while Michael Caine delivers another solid supporting role as conjurer's device-maker, or ingeneur, Cutter.
Jackman and Bale get to glower and brood possibly more than they managed in their respective superhero franchises, but it's hard to see their characters as much more than part of the film's elaborate construct. And so The Prestige ends up feeling more mathematical than magical.
Yes, it does great sleight of hand. But it's also slight of anything to capture the interest outside its focus on the bogus hocus pocus.
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Scarlett Johansson, Michael Caine, David Bowie
Director: Christopher Nolan
Rating: M (medium-level violence)
Running time: 130 mins
Screening: SkyCity, Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas
