Gillian Armstrong’s Death Defying Acts tries to ride whatever bandwagon The Illusionist and The Prestige set into motion but trades suspense entirely for tawdry period swoonery. Armstrong wastes no time submitting to cliché, sinking her largely fictionalized Harry Houdini (Guy Pierce) into the waters surrounding some grossly CGIed city while Saoirse Ronan rambles on the soundtrack about sweet lies and trickery. “You play the game or you go under—that’s what Mom always said, and if it wasn’t for her we would have drowned long ago,” the unfortunately named Benji (Ronan) says, explaining the thieving to which she and her mother Mary (an ingratiating Catherine Zeta-Jones) quirkily subject the denizens of Edinburgh, though she could just as easily be talking about Houdini himself, who arrives in their mangy city promising a reward to anyone who can tell him what his mother’s dying words were. “Way out of your depth” is what Houdini’s right-hand Sugarman (Timothy Spall) says to Mary, who predictably goes from bad to good after being gripped by Houdini’s cheekbones and the script’s plethora of execrable swimming idioms. Shrouded in water-logged imagery and Scottish brogues as thick as Cezary Skubiszewski’s music, the film is one-note—a cheap inventory of old-hat period romping that downplays Houdini’s contempt for psychics while saddling him with corny mommy issues.
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