wtmerrett I was hoping this would have been better but was sadly disappointed. The facts of Houdini's life were well represented but this so called movie was just a series of events strung together with little story to bring them life. Badly written. Badly directed and with some atrocious acting thrown in here and there. The fact that Houdini died due to a blow to the stomach is well known but the director and writer felt they had to remind us of this fact at least a dozen times with horrible effects of a fist to the abdomen and the internal muscles shown getting hit in slow motion. Come on...we get it..stop hitting us over the head with this image. It recalled an Oliver Stone picture and his annoying not at all subtle approach. There was no development of the characters or anything about who they are and why they are the way they are. The Houdini story could make a good movie but not with this director or writer having anything to do with it. Run.....don't walk away from this boring mess.

thecrazyelwin Its a shame that a channel like History would show such fiction. This movie is more based on, or an accumulation of, past movies on the man than they are on his actual life.It is entertainment and in such, writers will change what they want to make it more interesting. As the saying goes "Controversy creates cash." If not, then Hollywood would be broke.As far as facts, they did get his name right. The way he met his wife, also quite true. His relationship with his father, no. His relationship with his mother they really down played, he was very devoted to her. The time lines of his escapes, wrong and the secret agent stuff was the worst fiction of all.For a mini-series, they told less about the man than the 1953 movie with Tony Curtis. While the 1953 movie had it's own mistakes, it was a lot more accurate than this mini-series was. I gave it 2 stars only because the actors did good with what they had.

Jackson Booth-Millard Directed by Uli Edel (Body of Evidence, The Little Vampire), I spotted this two-part miniseries advertised and became most interested both because of the story of the famous man of the title and the leading actor playing him. Basically this television made film tells the life story of legendary and world famous Hungarian-American illusionist and escape artist Harry Houdini (Adrien Brody), looking behind all the magic tricks and traps to getaway from that brought him fame and fortune. This includes his childhood living in poverty, his early beginnings doing magic tricks on the street and in the circus, meeting and marrying his beloved Bess Houdini (The Cabin in the Woods' Kristen Connolly), meeting and partnering with Jim Collins (Jarhead's Evan Jones) who became his stage assistant. The legendary escape challenges for Harry featured include from a jail cell, the Chinese water torture cell, the suspended straitjacket escape, chained up and jumping into icy water from a bridge and escaping from a locked bank vault style safe, it also shows Harry using his kills to engage in espionage missions for the government, working for head of MI5 William Melville (Tim Pigott-Smith). Through the years he encounters great names of the era, including Sherlock Holmes creator and spiritualist believer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (The World Is Not Enough's David Calder), Tsar Nicolas II of Russia, mystical adviser Grigori Rasputin and Presidents of the United States. Following the death of his mother, Cecilia Weiss (Eszter Ónodi), he seeks to confront, battle with and expose fraudulent spiritualists, but ultimately he returns to his magic routes until mortal pains occur, most likely caused by many punches in the stomach that he took and blocked out the pain, in the end Harry Houdini died at age 52 of peritonitis, secondary to a ruptured appendix. Also starring Tom Benedict Knight as Dash Houdini, Shaun Williamson as Riley, Linda Marlowe as Lady Doyle and Louis Mertens as Erich Weiss. Brody is a very good choice as the leading man, Connolly is also well cast as his both loving and long concerned wife, the style of editing and use of special effects makes for great trick and escape sequences, you are gripped into finding out whether he will do it or not, and how, and the personal character story throughout is interesting to watch as well, all in all it was a well thought out and interesting drama. Very good!

A_Different_Drummer ... which is both a good and a bad thing.It is a good thing because over the course of the 2-parter you start to realize that the intensity comes not from the escapes, but rather from Connolly simultaneously delivering her dialog with that machine-gun rasp of hers, at the same time those extra-wide "cartoon" eyes pause for emphasis. I don't mean to make light of this, it is very unusual, and very effective.The bad news is that, as interesting as Connolly is, she should really not be able to steal the entire film. That she can, speaks to the weakness of the script, and meandering self-indulgent arc that passes for a plot.Brody tries hard. In fact, Brody is one of those actors who seems to be merely tolerated by his audience during his actual career but, I suspect, will become a cult idol to nextgen viewers. Here he does the best he can with what he was given.If you bring no expectations to this film, it is entertaining, although truth be told I think the History Channel should set its standards a bit higher. (With Hatfields/McCoys, which I reviewed here, they nailed it AND were factually accurate to boot).Never liked the Curtis film but I did read Houdini's autobiography, so I empathize with the angry reviews in this list.In the end, it is true, Houdini was able to escape everything but his own ambition.