The Prestige

Submitted by corwin on Sat, 28 Oct 2006 12:49am

-1.0000000 Bolls

It's a rare thing that I manage to get out to an actual theater for a movie these days. As expensive as such an excursion can be, I tend to be extremely picky about what I pay ticket prices for. But from the first time I saw a trailer for The Prestige, I knew it was going to be one I needed to take the risk on, and I am certainly glad I did.The Prestige is the story of the unholy rivalry between two stage magicians. What begins as relatively friendly competition between two bright, young, apprentices quickly blossoms into a dark obsession, fraught with physical and emotional danger and damage, consuming both men and threatening to destroy the lives of everyone around them. When Alfred Borden (played by Christian Bale) develops the ultimate magic trick, Robert Angier (played by Hugh Jackman) will stop at nothing to discover the secret.

Both Bale and Jackman are fully believable as magicians driven by obsession, each utterly consumed with the need to show up, humiliate, and generally revenge himself upon the other. Michael Caine turns in another in a long line of strong performances as Angier's engineer Cutter, trying to act as the voice of reason in the midst of the magicians' mad plots. And David Bowie's Nikola Tesla gives us a glimpse of another all-consuming and ultimately destructive obsessive rivalry, between himself and Thomas Edison and their fight over alternating versus direct current. While great talent giving their all to the roles will not necessarily make for a great movie, it certainly does here. The various twists and turns of the plot, all of the lies and betrayals, everything builds continuously to a climax that hits you like a sucker punch. Even when you know what's coming and understand fully the depths to which each man has sunk in an effort to destroy his rival, it's still incredibly powerful to watch everything play out. It's clear from the outset that nothing good can come of their shared obsession, and it all goes downhill from there. I'm going to go out on a limb and say The Prestige is as good as Uwe's movies are bad: a full negative 1.0 Boll. Go see it. Now.