Magic

Magic won't win points for uniqueness, that's for sure. Nor will it be make anyone's list of white-knuckle thrillers. Magic is, really, a riff on Psycho; a shy, weird, introverted man can only express himself show personality through a proxy. The difference is in execution; Norman Bates' proxy -- his dead mother -- solely manifested as his twisted, murderous side, and Norman himself was usually quite unassuming and polite. Some might find Norman a little TOO polite, but mostly, he's a soft-spoken boy-next-door. No reason to suspect him of having a side that is homicidal. In fact, Magic flips the script. Anthony Hopkins plays Corky, a stage magician who is too shy to hold an audience, until he brings in a wise-cracking, foul-mouthed ventriloquist's dummy named Fats as a "partner". Fats says all the things Corky wants to. Fats is charming, gregarious, and clever, where Corky is nervous, sweaty, twitchy, and befuddled. Right off the bat, you know Corky has mental health issues. As the movie slowly progresses (and I do mean slowly, this is a pot boiling on the lowest setting), the schism in Corky's mind widens. He and Fats have conversations; Fats schemes and plans and tells him to do bad things, especially when Fats feels threatened by Corky wanting to break away and live a life with a someone from school he's courting. Corky doesn't want to. Corky and Fats are two sides of a man, but they're also synergizing. The whole ventriloquist-and-his-dummy-are-crazy-together isn't anything particularly new either, but credit to Magic in that it doesn't do anything supernatural to make Fats come alive. Fats is only in Corky's head, and the dummy is just an tangible representation of the man Corky wishes he could be, and it's the friction between the two sides tearing him apart. If I need to tell you Hopkins does good acting here, I'm gonna question how many movies you've seen. OF COURSE ANTHONY HOPKINS CAN ACT, and of course he can act crazy. This is his movie, and he owns every scene he's in. The rest of the cast is ... fine, I guess. Ann-Margaret does what she can with what she's given, but she's mostly a prop to tease redemption for Corky but really help hasten his deterioration. Burgess Meredith plays an agent, and he pretty much plays himself. It's not a bad thing, it works just fine, but it's also just fine. Ann-Maragret's husband is played by character actor Ed Lauter; he's an "oh, that guy" type, and that's about the level of his character here. What hurts the movie more than anything is the pacing. The slow burn is both too slow and too obvious. It comes off like a TV movie (and in fact, the cut of this available on Shudder is the television cut, complete with bad ADR to cover up R-rated language and fade-to-black commercial break spots). You know where everything is headed, and sometimes, you just want it to get there already. And the ending, while poetic and definitely not what you expect, also fails to give the movie an exciting climax. It just sort of whimpers away, like a scolded dog. But there's still something that kept me interested in this movie. Mostly, it's Hopkins, but there's also this weird quality to the movie I can't put into words. There's an unsettling creepiness to the movie, and I ended up hoping it wouldn't end in tragedy. Not often I want the happy ending, especially in a horror movie, but this movie made me hope for it. I gotta give it points for that. Just track down the theatrical cut if you're interested, as I'm sure that has a little more bite to it.