Houdini (2014)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Thanks for the memories!

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Harry Houdini (1874-1926) was a famous Hungarian-American escapologist- somebody who escapes from seemingly impossible combinations of locks, chains, and boxes.Houdini (Lionsgate) is a TV movie I watched for thirty-five minutes. Then I ejected it from my device and returned it to my local library.I suppose one cannot blame the writer entirely on this epic failure. The DP should also be scrutinized. This mess of a TV movie was clearly not a collaboration. Houdini appears to be several people's "ideas" who all wanted included in this film to satisfy their own individual needs and not the audiences.That being said, Lionsgate's Houdini is a terrible movie with terrible visuals and a story no one cares about. It is a movie suitable for a teenage video-gamer who hated studying history while in school, and was nursed on CSI and bad CGI.Poor Mr. Brody! So talented. Poor Mr. Houdini. This TV movie will surely make people forget him.Here's the bad: 1. The voice over. It is painfully annoying. Writers learn that voice overs should be kept to a minimum. Preferably, not used at all. Why? The actors and the visuals should tell the story. 2.The writing. There is very little compelling dialogue or action to help tell Houdini's unique story. 3. The visuals. The ones in this movie overpower the acting. The DP annoys the viewer with unnecessary slow motion, unnecessary closeups, and other unnecessary camera movements. Therefore, we do not experience - or are awed by - Houdini's physical feats, or Brody's interpretations of those feats. For example, we are shown one of those typical, typical, typical CSI shots of the inside of a lock being picked. Really? That's all you got? 4. The costumes and makeup. The costumes are clownish. The makeup overdone and not accurate. Think Rocky Horror Picture Show. 5. The music. Annoying and not appropriate for this story. Also, music is supposed to dwell in the background of the story and help set the tone. 6. The feel and tone. There is none. The turn-of-the-century is not a difficult time in history to authentically capture. Lionsgate's Houdini regurgitates way too many concepts and ideas already seen on TV and in movies that, basically, did nothing for those shows/movies, too.Again, a teenage video-gamer would probably enjoy Houdini since teenagers also regurgitate the same old same old while glued to their violent video games creating nothing new or noteworthy in their lives while sucking on the visual stimulation teat rather than the mentally stimulating teat.I doubt the screenwriter of Houdini studied adaptation. I know writers who have studied adaptation and could have done the book justice. In the business of entertainment, your d**k would appear bigger if you just tucked it back inside your pants, took a step back, and hired the right person to do the job. When you don't, well, you get Houdini (Lionsgate). You also get a super-inflated ego until the bad reviews start coming in.

Directed by Uli Edel (Body of Evidence, The Little Vampire), I spotted this two-part miniseries advertised and became most interested both because of the story of the famous man of the title and the leading actor playing him. Basically this television made film tells the life story of legendary and world famous Hungarian-American illusionist and escape artist Harry Houdini (Adrien Brody), looking behind all the magic tricks and traps to getaway from that brought him fame and fortune. This includes his childhood living in poverty, his early beginnings doing magic tricks on the street and in the circus, meeting and marrying his beloved Bess Houdini (The Cabin in the Woods' Kristen Connolly), meeting and partnering with Jim Collins (Jarhead's Evan Jones) who became his stage assistant. The legendary escape challenges for Harry featured include from a jail cell, the Chinese water torture cell, the suspended straitjacket escape, chained up and jumping into icy water from a bridge and escaping from a locked bank vault style safe, it also shows Harry using his kills to engage in espionage missions for the government, working for head of MI5 William Melville (Tim Pigott-Smith). Through the years he encounters great names of the era, including Sherlock Holmes creator and spiritualist believer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (The World Is Not Enough's David Calder), Tsar Nicolas II of Russia, mystical adviser Grigori Rasputin and Presidents of the United States. Following the death of his mother, Cecilia Weiss (Eszter Ónodi), he seeks to confront, battle with and expose fraudulent spiritualists, but ultimately he returns to his magic routes until mortal pains occur, most likely caused by many punches in the stomach that he took and blocked out the pain, in the end Harry Houdini died at age 52 of peritonitis, secondary to a ruptured appendix. Also starring Tom Benedict Knight as Dash Houdini, Shaun Williamson as Riley, Linda Marlowe as Lady Doyle and Louis Mertens as Erich Weiss. Brody is a very good choice as the leading man, Connolly is also well cast as his both loving and long concerned wife, the style of editing and use of special effects makes for great trick and escape sequences, you are gripped into finding out whether he will do it or not, and how, and the personal character story throughout is interesting to watch as well, all in all it was a well thought out and interesting drama. Very good!

Viewed as a work of fiction this film is entertaining and worth watching. I say that as at the beginning of this picture it is made clear that the play contains fact and fiction, yet at the very end credits it is stated the movie is fiction.Yet we all surely know that Houdini was historically a most famous "escape artist" and illusionist and forerunner to the likes of David Copperfield and David Blaine.It would interesting to hear from a historian familiar with the real life Houdini to learn how accurate or otherwise this film is in its depiction of Houdini. From my knowledge much of the major incidents in the picture are factually based.Where the movie scores heavily is, firstly, that it illustrates in detail the amazing escapes and illusions performed and for the most part shows how these tricks were done. Secondly, following the death of his mother, Houdini became a skeptic of spiritualists who were all the rage during this time period, and the movie handles Houdini's contempt for that very well.The acting, direction, sets and music are all of a high quality and despite the film lasting over 2 parts @ 3-4 hours in total it had my attention throughout.Well done History Channel!7/10

...but highly watchable nonetheless. 'Houdini' is nothing we haven't seen before. This is so formulaic that really without much rewriting this film could be about anyone. This script is dead awful in terms of creating a story about the life of a real human being. This is the kind of picture 'Dewey Cox' lampooned so brutally. But really I sort of expected this going into 'Houdini'. Bio pics really are a dime a dozen. None of them are particularly imaginative in framing the stories of their subjects. It's all about the presentation and the lead actor. In these regards 'Houdini' is a very fortunate movie. It's well shot, staged. and is very imaginative. Above anything else though Adrien Brody is the savior of this film. I think had a lesser actor been cast this movie could have been a disaster. This is a performance that transcends the clichés.One of the glaring problems 'Houdini' and most bio pics has is that they want their titular characters to dissect life in a way that no real human ever does. Harry Houdini was a brilliant magician but that was also his job. If 'Houdini' wanted to dissect life through the lens of it's character it would devote more time to showing Houdini developing his performances and exploring his relationship with the audience. I really fail to see why this isn't more simple to comprehend. So the least interesting aspects of the film all have to do with the comical monologues Brody is given as he explains his deepest darkest fears. Frankly, they make Houdini sound pretentious and whiny. Brody does his best with them but they hurt both the pacing of the film and the audience's relationship with the character.Unsurprisingly 'Houdini' works brilliantly when it goes into his magic acts. Brody exhibits a great starry eyed quality into his character. There's a great moment in the film when Harry talks about striving to give his audience the best and how that serves as a constant challenge to one up himself. Everything is recreated in a painstaking manner and Brody actually does a great job setting up these tricks. He is brilliant at making us interested. The second half which delves into his quest to debunk spiritualists is even better than the first half. It really leaves the traps of the script here and we see Houdini as a real character. Frankly, I think this is what I admired most about Houdini. Brody shows Houdini as a man in grief who wants nothing more than to be wrong and to believe in a world of the fantastic despite knowing the secrets behind every magic trick. I think a great film could just be made with this aspect of Houdini's life because it shows Houdini for what he was best at, bending secrets. The fact that he bends secrets because he cares about people though is what makes him identifiable. 'Houdini' is goofy but really in the scope of things it is harmless and Adrien Brody is able to do some good things with the role. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in Harry Houdini and wants a somewhat fresh looking take. It's not terrible but serviceable. At the very most Adrien Brody wants to have fun even if it is ridiculous and Harry Houdini is remembered because of his ability to bring fun to the audiences.