Magicians film review

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MAGICIANS

Best known as the stars of the hilarious and innovative Channel 4 comedy Peep Show, David Mitchell and Robert Webb now make their first foray on to the big screen. It's written by the same writers as their TV comedy and directed by Andrew O' Connor, who viewers may remember as a comedian/presenter in the 1990s and who now runs one of the UK's most successful independent production companies.

It's always tricky for an established TV comedy team to break into cinema. For every Monty Python success there are plenty of League of Gentlemen semi-failures, and while it's clear that fans of Peep Show may provide an initial audience for Magicians, they are likely to leave disappointed and unlikely to recommend it to their friends.

The fact is that while Peep Show is both ground-breaking and hilarious, as well as being full of cracking characters, Magicians feels like it belongs in the 1970s.

This is partly due to the production values, which are on the shoddy side, but largely down to a script which lacks laughs and which doesn't really seem believable in this day and age.

We're meant to believe that Harry and Karl (Mitchell and Webb respectively) are feuding magicians, having once ruled the roost with their amazing double act. When an accident curtails their relationship and they stop speaking to return to civvy street, it's five years until they decide to give it one more go at the national magic championships. But since the explosion of street magic, David Blaine and the internet, it doesn't really seem believable that they would stand a chance of winning with a guillotine trick that seems to have been around forever.

There are some - occasional - laughs, and Mitchell and Webb basically reprise their familiar TV characters. There's also some decent support from Jessica Stevenson and Peter Capaldi and notably Darren Boyd, whose rival magician has the film's funniest lines. But overall this is a curious anachronism which fails to gel.

Paul Hurley