Movie Review: The Prestige ****

There are three steps in magic: the pledge, the turn and the prestige. The magician promises to do a trick, makes something disappear, and brings it back. Only the bringing back - the prestige - makes the show worth the cost of admission. A movie filled with twists of the plot and flashbacks, "The Prestige" is a movie that you must see straight through from beginning to end without interruption or you will be confused eternally. At the outset, a tragedy makes bitter enemies of former friends in late-19th Century London. A British magician (Christian Bale) and an American magician (Hugh Jackman) engage in a fierce duel to perform the most amazing trick possible and to sabotage one another. As one magician sits in jail for murder, flashbacks inform the viewers how he came to that point.
Michael Caine gives a characteristically excellent performance as the ingeneur to a number of magicians. The ingeneur is the brains of the operation - the man who knows the secrets to the magic tricks and teaches the magician how to perform them. A magician really is just a performer - a man entertaining the audience with the tricks that his ingeneur has developed for him. Scarlett Johansson plays the assistant to one of the magicians, who changes sides but may be either a double agent for her first boss or a turncoat. Despite their similarity of profession, the two magicians are not alike or cliched in their roles. One plays the confident master and the other an obsessive pretender, determined to discover the secret to the trademark trick of his adversary. Obsession leads him to America, to Colorado, where Nikola Tesla might hold the answer to his need for the greatest trick of all. The questions persist: who is the better magician, and what happens if the audience sees a feat of real magic? Does the audience want real magic, or would they prefer to be fooled?
In terms of content, "The Prestige" is rated PG-13 for disturbing images. There are some death scenes, including one suicide, so the kids definitely do not need to see this one. The language is relatively clean, however, and there are no naughty bits. You will want to see it more than once to try to catch the things you missed the first time. Most importantly for a cloak and dagger thriller, they tie up all of the loose ends at the conclusion. No matter how muddled you are at times, you will be able to understand exactly what happened and why.