Christopher Nolan's own prestige takes a knock with this fantastically boring and self-important movie about two stage magicians in Edwardian London, starring Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale. There's a reliably eccentric cameo from David Bowie, playing the maverick inventor Nikola Tesla, investigating the magic of electricity in his secret lair, surrounded by what looks like a couple of dozen giant-sized Van de Graaff generators, all zapping unsafely away and looking like they might at any moment incinerate Bowie's splendidly contoured moustache. Scarlett Johansson plays an unfeasibly sexy magician's assistant with a cock-er-ney accent that makes her sound like Martine McCutcheon's Canadian cousin.
Jackman and Bale play Angier and Borden, two magicians consumed with fanatical rivalry and hatred. Jackman is the debonair stylist addicted to applause; Bale is the pugnacious wide-boy with the genuine vocation for magic. Michael Caine is landed with the supremely dull role of the "ingeneur" - the backroom boffin who has to listen to, and deliver, explanatory speeches.
"Prestige", a magicians' technical term invented by author Christopher Priest for his original 1995 novel, means the crowning moment of a trick. It's the gasp-inducing climactic flourish, the moment whose devastating impact has to be guarded as closely as possible before detonation. So it is odd that the prestige of this film, the trick ending, is gradually given away over the final 40 or so minutes in a series of extended takes and giveaway closeups. Why? Because the director figured we were going to guess anyway?
Christopher Nolan is not striving for his own narrative conjuring trick in the style of M Night Shyamalan or David Mamet. Nor is he in the business of deconstructing the tricks of the magician's trade: a little exasperatingly, he declines to reveal how a young woman can be magicked out of a tank of water and be completely dry with not a hair out of place. The drama is supposed to reside more in the human battle, the deadly duel between these two illusionists, and the disturbing suspicion that Angiers has made a Faustian bargain with Tesla to create some genuine occult magic on the frontiers of what is scientifically thinkable.
How startlingly dull it all is. The vital elements of wit, of insolence, of light-footedness and light-headedness that make magic so compelling - and incidentally, also made Christopher Nolan's first two films so compelling - are all neglected in favour of a desperately humourless and unsmilingly acted contest, with borrowings from David Cronenberg. Unexpectedly, the frisson of interest is from Bowie, who - with his patina of strangeness and awkward reticence, almost ventriloquising his lines from a near-immobile face - does indeed seem like a man with a hint of craziness, or genius.
The movie's opening and closing images are of a hillside covered, surreally, in top hats. There are no rabbits to be pulled from any of them.