59
Metascore
14 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- The Magician has an intensity and power many conventionally budgeted thrillers miss. Robustly funny, X-rated dialogue delivered with laid-back confidence and stomach-turning nonchalance also help.
- It's something of a personal triumph: Scott Ryan not only wrote and directed, but puts on a superbly believable turn as Ray - a low-rent, swaggering psycho, a long way from the suit-wearing assassins of Hollywood myth.
- It's amusing and weirdly convincing.
- Whether or not The Magician rises to the level of its cinematic predecessors may be up for debate, but thanks to a smart, cleverly constructed screenplay and a compelling lead performance, Ryan’s film displays a flair for storytelling that’s notably lacking in many first-time features. It’s a great addition to the Blue Tongue catalogue, and it’ll be interesting to see where Ryan turns up next.
- 70Time OutTime OutA little over-extended – it has its origins in a festival short – and only partially successful in developing the bizarre, humanising bond between filmmaker and subject, as well as suggesting the moral quagmire of Melbourne’s social underbelly, it’s nevertheless memorable for its spasmodic moments of sublimely black humour.
- 50Slant MagazineDiego SemereneSlant MagazineDiego SemereneThe Magician might have worked better if it could have sustained for its first several sequences a sense of genre confusion.
- 40L.A. WeeklyErnest HardyL.A. WeeklyErnest HardyThe viewer is meant to chuckle at the escalating violence-ringed absurdities (the kidnapping of a bafflingly passive drug dealer who winds up becoming a road-trip buddy, for example) and at Ray's brutish philosophies, but the chuckles are few. Though the film starts out modestly amusing, it very, very quickly lists into tedium.
- 30The New York TimesJeannette CatsoulisThe New York TimesJeannette CatsoulisSpectacularly uninteresting...this dreary Antipodean curiosity is a yob-filled slog of hard-man posturing, all of it bathed in an oppressive testosterone funk. And I haven’t even mentioned the hairy buttocks.