Carl Nilsson-Polias

Gillian Armstrong’s latest directorial outing, Death Defying Acts, is a glossy cage of cinematic feints signifying nothing. The story is a pretty typical contrivance — a rich man offers a reward and a pair of likely aspirants try to con their way into a fortune. The twist is that the rich man is Harry Houdini and that one of the money-hungry aspirants is Catherine Zeta-Jones - although apparently she’s playing a character.

Guy Pearce, who plays Houdini, is at his best (as in L.A. Confidential) when playing men with a dangerously fractured masculinity. His jaw line’s mix of delicate effeminacy and bristling physical tension gives him a vulnerability and impotence that is always a fidget away from shocking rage and untempered violence. As Houdini, Pearce has returned to the physical form and masochistic drive of the bodybuilder he once was. The role should be a good fit, but instead we are given a self-conscious blankness that makes Houdini a hollow showman.

Zeta-Jones is similarly superficial and dislikeable as a hardened single-mother-cum-sexy-psychic. Her precocious daughter (Saoirse Ronan) is, well, precocious. Timothy Spall pops in and lends his doughy jowls to proceedings but can’t lift the film out of its pointlessness.

If everyone is an illusionist, if every action and emotion is just a sleight of hand, then the unreality has to be unapologetically spectacular or there’s nothing to care about. Death Defying Acts is a cheap stunt parading as something more, but I think we can spot a naked emperor when we see one.