But when everything from keeping lock picks in his callouses or Bess slipping him a key in a kiss is played as a triumph of human ingenuity, they come across as hollow wins. Some of these are legitimately clever and fun to watch like minor heist films, like Houdini making a church bell ring at a distance. For some reason, the miniseries takes great pains to reveal how all of the escapes were accomplished. And, like the rest of Houdini’s act, it’s a cheap parlor trick. Uli Edel’s direction is excited, trying to communicate how remarkable it would be to actually see these feats performed, but in practice these sequences gain most of their effectiveness from mildly disorienting the viewer. Many of the best scenes find Houdini and his assistant Jim Collins ( Evan Jones) displaying new magical feats, particularly a well drawn-out disappearing trick. The series’ many capers, do, to some extent, resemble superpowers. For the purposes of Houdini, the man born Erik Weisz is a superhero whose powers involve the clever use of lock picks. If he did, it almost certainly wasn’t as pulpy as an embassy heist. These do increase in grandeur-Houdini even becomes a spy for the British and Americans amid the buildup to World War I-though it’s at best unclear whether or not the historical Houdini actually committed espionage. Brody should be a great casting choice ( he used to be a magician), but when his Houdini isn’t not smarmily winking at things that haven’t happened to him yet (like offhandedly asking his future engineer to make an elephant disappear, years before the actual event) or being upset that not enough people love him as much as he wants them too, he’s just drifting from one feat to the next. The writers put cardboard obstacles in his path and tell us how great he is instead of actually proving it. Uninterested in the parts that aren’t cool, the miniseries meanders through some of the drudgery of Houdini’s work, his family, and his marriage to Bess (an underserved and underperforming Kristen Connolly), rendering an American folk hero in blocky CGI.Īs played by Brody, Houdini is a singularly driven prick who gets by because history dictates that he has to. Its narrative moves through each of Houdini’s new tricks, from escaping from a water tank to jumping off a bridge to spying on Kaiser Wilhelm and debunking mediums, while jumping around in time for no reason in an unintentional parody of TV period pieces. ![]() The miniseries purports to tell Houdini’s story, but what it really portrays is a series of spectacles, each emptier than the next. Unfortunately, tonight's History Channel two-part miniseries Houdini, written by Nicholas Meyer and starring Academy Award winner Adrien Brody as Harry Houdini, fails to deliver on every one of these counts. And at the very least, there should be at least a dash of uncertainty something that can be paid off in the same way The Prestige resolves the workings of its seemingly impossible dual Transported Man feats. Illusionist as a profession, like most careers, generally can’t sustain narrative entertainment by itself-the characters have to be compelling, have to make us care about the magic. Otherwise, how can we wonder if the trick will be successful, and when it is, feel compelled to make an effort to puzzle out what happened? In movies or TV, there’s an additional layer of artifice between the viewer and the “magician” that replaces the mystery of magic with the mystery of post-production. But magic really only works when the audience is experiencing it in, if not real life, at least real time. Tricks-sorry, illusions-are effective when they have a proper setup and a willing audience that’s looking to be hoodwinked (not unlike a TV audience). Sorry magicians, it’s not that you’re uninteresting-it’s that what you do is just really hard to dramatize. ![]() ![]() Making magic compelling on-screen is a really difficult trick.
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