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Australia · 2005
1h 25m
Director Scott Ryan
Starring Scott Ryan, Ben Walker, Massimiliano Andrighetto, Kane Mason
Genre Comedy, Drama
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A mockumentary following the dealings of a Melbourne-based hitman Ray as seen through the eyes of his neighbour Max, a film student. As Max documents Ray's work life in the criminal underworld, he develops an unusual friendship with his subject.
Despite a brief lull midway through the 83 minutes, The Magician largely succeeds as a good short story, thanks to Ryan's captivating performance in the lead role. An unlikely road movie/buddy movie hybrid, it has all the makings of a cult hit among discerning DVD collectors.
Bearing a passing resemblance to both Man Bites Dog and Chopper, its hardly original, but still a laudable example of proficient guerilla moviemaking.
Slant Magazine by Diego Semerene
The Magician might have worked better if it could have sustained for its first several sequences a sense of genre confusion.
The 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.
The New York Times by Jeannette Catsoulis
Spectacularly 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.
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