For whatever reason, this was always the last Christopher Nolan film I hadn’t seen (until, now, The Odyssey), so I decided on a whim to change that. As his last film pre-Dark Knight, I was curious what kind of spectacle this would present. While I used to enjoy him a lot more, I am fairly hit-or-miss on Nolan these days. As a result, I will always sort of wonder how this would have affected me if I saw it as an impressionable teenager. Seeing it today, after two decades of Nolan twists and turns, this didn’t engage me as much as I suspect it would have then. I didn’t guess the twist—mostly for lack of trying, which is my default mode for mysteries—but I wasn’t all that impressed even when it all came together. Credit where it’s due, I am a sucker for asynchronous storytelling, and this film had that in spades. Also, my goodness, even having now seen this, I (like most people, if the internet is to be believed) will never be able to separate it in my head from the other magician mystery movie from the same year, Edward Norton’s vehicle The Illusionist. I had hoped seeing at least one of the two would clear that up in my mind but apparently not. That probably does a disservice in some direction, but I can’t tell which.
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