Fine technical wizardry went into The Illusionist to capture the flavour of early 20th century Europe and the odd dichotomy of the era's forward-looking pragmatism and inward-seeking mysticism.

Yet this period piece about the power of magic lacks just that. The magic of romance, drama, longing and faith generally is missing in director Neil Burger's tale of a love triangle involving a magician, a noblewoman and the heir to the Austrian throne.

Expanding the screenplay from a short story by Steven Millhauser, Burger crafts a movie with a sumptuous visual palette but little heart, the characters detached and cold-blooded, their supposed ardour an illusion.

It's no surprise that an inscrutable poker-face such as Edward Norton plays the title role as such a closed-book. It's quite a sleight of hand, though, for a film to thoroughly constrain a co-star as expressive as Paul Giamatti into a character so aloof he barely registers emotionally.

The Illusionist is meant as a cat-and-mouse game between Norton's stage magician and Giamatti's police detective, a man charged with debunking the prestidigitator as a fraud and deflating the mystery surrounding the man.

A rather awkward prologue of flashbacks introduces the unlikely conflict that emerges among the four key players. Norton's Eisenheim comes from working-class stock, yet he and aristocratic neighbour Sophie strike up a friendship as children bordering on forbidden puppy love.

Society forces them apart, and Eisenheim - already an accomplished magician - wanders the globe for years, accumulating skills of illusion that appear supernatural. He turns up in Vienna in 1900, captivating crowds with his trickery, becoming such a sensation that Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell) turns up for a performance.

When Eisenheim asks for a helper from the audience, Leopold volunteers his fiance, who turns out to be Sophie (Jessica Biel), a woman presented as far too forceful and independent-minded to ever have ended up betrothed to the vain and brutish prince.

Romantic fireworks apparently are going off between Eisenheim and Sophie, though you'd never know it from the dour, drowsy affair on which they embark.

Leopold senses that Eisenheim is a rival in love as well as an obstacle whose popularity challenges the prince's philosophy of scientific skepticism. The prince enlists his attack dog, police inspector Uhl (Giamatti), demanding that the magician be exposed as a charlatan.

Though her performance is as passionless as Norton's, Giamatti's and Sewell's, Biel stands out if only for holding her own among three proven dramatic actors, showing she has the restraint and subtlety for costume theatrics.

The bleak action of The Illusionist ultimately tumbles into an artificial and unsatisfying conclusion meant as a surprise ending but which has the effect of watching a magician abandon an elaborate illusion in midstream and finish with a cheap card trick instead.

Where director Burger succeeds is in capturing fine period detail, modern Prague substituting for old Vienna. Some of the magic tricks have an air of Gothic horror to them, while Burger and cinematographer Dick Pope filter their images to simulate an early 20th century process called autochrome photography, infusing the film with soft tints resembling old colour pictures.

The magic of technique The Illusionist possesses, however, does not compensate for the magic of substance and passion it lacks.

Two stars out of four.