Death Defying Acts: Rating: 0.5 star

A sultry medium (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and her daughter (Saiorse Ronan) set out to con Harry Houdini (Guy Pearce), but end up falling in love — well, two out of three, anyway.

Death Defying Acts (2007)
2007 · PG · Drama
Reviewed March 20, 2009

Man, I am on a film-hatin’ streak here — three reviews in a row where I get to go on a rant. Am I becoming a cinema snob, or is my Netflix queue randomly serving up suck these days? I am going to go ahead and blame Netflix, as I usually do. There is no way I can claim to be a snob, considering how much I enjoyed Sharks in Venice.

I feel obliged to point out here — okay, that does sound snobbish — that I have been a Houdini buff for years, so it was with mixed feelings that I heard a new Houdini movie was coming out. On the one hand, yay, because it just goes to show how well Houdini’s brilliant self-promotion worked that we’re still talking about him nearly a century after his death; on the other hand, bleh, because Houdini films never get anything right. They change the facts, they change the man, they change everything, and usually for no valid reason. Maybe it’s more dramatic if Houdini is shown to die while doing the Underwater Torture stunt — 1953 movie, I’m looking at you here — but his real death had enough drama without going that far. Now everyone thinks he died doing that stunt, and it makes my nitpicky brain ache.

When this oddly-dehyphenated title started cluttering up my “Houdini” Google alert (and did I mention I’m a buff, already?), I was tentatively hopeful, because it’s one of the first movies to deal mainly with Houdini’s Spiritualist investigations, rather than his escape acts. For the last decade or so of his life, Houdini turned his attentions from escapology to parapsychology, investigating famous mediums for proof of life after death. His interest began in good faith; spurred on by the death of his beloved mother, he hoped to find a way to contact her in the afterlife. Unfortunately, all he met with were frauds and shams, whom he easily exposed with his own experise in stagecraft. The failures made him bitter, and increasingly anti-Spiritualist. By the time of his death, he had angered the entire Spiritualist world and incurred more than a few death threats.

The plot of this film — Houdini investigating an alluring female medium — bears a distinct resemblance to an actual investigation he undertook, wherein he helped to expose a fake medium named Mina Crandon. Like the lady in the film, Mina — codenamed “Margery” to protect her privacy — was a sexy woman with a knack for seducing supposedly impartial investigators into helping her “act”; unlike the film, Mina and Houdini’s mutual rancor never mutated into love. I wouldn’t mind a film that explored the possibilities of an affair between Houdini and a medium — hell, I’d welcome one; it’d be fun — but this… no. Nail it up in a box and throw it in the river, please, because it blows.

First off, there’s the problem of casting. Not with Catherine Zeta-Jones, who is as blindingly gorgeous as she always is, or even with the kid actor, who can (miracle of miracles!) actually act. No, the problem is with Guy Pearce, who is not the Houdini type. At all. Houdini was very short and very Jewish and very good-looking. Guy Pearce is none of those things. In 1926, the year this story is set, Houdini was in his 50s and looking it, with graying hair and a tired look around the eyes. Guy Pearce looks… whatever age he actually is, and it ain’t mid-50s. I’ve watched and liked Guy Pearce in other films, so I can’t really call him a terrible actor; let’s just say he’s not at all suited for this role, and leave it at that.

Pearce’s casting is a major problem, but it’s not the film’s only one. Everything about this film, even its flaws, are predictable and cliched — the child’s voice-over narration, the pretentiously ponderous script, the melodramatic finale. Things start out well, with amusing scenes of the mother and daughter’s con jobs and stage act, but when Houdini enters it devolves into a romantic melodrama so tepid and insipid that it made me long for the punch-and-pizzaz of Titanic’s Jack and Rose. (Do you know how hard it is to make me think of that romance with kindness? IT IS DAMN HARD, people.) Pearce gazes, Zeta-Jones poses, the music swells, and the audience melts — at least, that’s how it must have played out in Gillian Armstrong’s head. (On my couch, though, it played out as me propping my eyes open with my fingers and “accidentally” resting my elbow on the remote’s fast-forward button.)

For film fans, it’s bad; for Houdini fans, it’s worse. Any Houdini aficionado will, if prompted (and sometimes even if not… *cough*), rant at length about all the movies that have played fast and loose with the facts, from Houdini’s appearance to his act to the manner of his death. Don’t expect this movie to break that trend. Aside from the problem of Pearce’s appearance, there’s also his accent, which neatly removes the “nu” from “New York”, if you get my drift. And then there’s his wife — wait, no, there isn’t; aside from maybe two passing references to her, the loyal Bess Houdini is conspicuously (and conveniently) absent. Fans of Houdini’s spiritualist debunkings and challenges will writhe at the idea that the $10,000 prize was actually awarded to any medium. And his exit scene, while not as bad as some portrayals (1953 Houdini, I’m looking at you), twists the facts around until they’re unintentionally hilarious — did you know that a ruptured appendix will drop you in your tracks and kill you within seconds?

I’ve long since given up hoping for a fictional portrayal of Houdini that actually follows the facts, and this movie didn’t have any pleasant surprises for me. Even if I weren’t a Houdini fan and a nitpicker, I’d still want my 97 minutes back.