First Hit: The film could have been interesting; however the execution was poorly conceived and didn't live up to its own imagination.
Heath Ledger was the star in this film but he died before he could complete it.
In this movie Heath plays Tony a conning trickster of sorts and is first introduced into this film by being rescued from under a bridge where he is hanging by his neck. How did he survive? He had a small metal flute placed in his throat to keep his windpipe from being crushed.
The people who find him hanging under the bridge and rescue him are Valentina (played by Lily Cole), Anton (played by Andrew Garfield) and Percy (played by Verne Troyer). This group of people is traveling in an ancient looking old rickety two story wood wagon drawn by two horses with a wizened old Doctor Parnassus (played by Christopher Plummer).
Hundreds of years earlier, this wise old Doctor sold his soul to the devil (played by Tom Waits) so that he could marry the woman of his dreams. She died having their child Valentina. What did Parnassus wager with the devil when he sold his soul? His daughter would be turned over to the devil on her 16th birthday if he hadn't converted a particular number of souls.
With her 16th birthday just a couple days away, Parnassus makes a new deal with the devil. If he can save 5 souls before midnight on the eve of his daughter’s birthday he can keep his daughter.
To save souls Parnassus has a mirror people can walk through and when he is concentrating, the moment people walk through the mirror, their imagination becomes their reality.
They become in touch with their true soul and with this new information come back out of the mirror to lead a saved life.
Tony is a con man, and an expert at conning women into going into the mirror, and with four of the five souls saved everyone thinks the girl will be saved from the devil. However the show goes bad when a bunch of Russians in the audience recognize Tony as the guy who stole their money (which was the reason why he was hanging by his neck under the bridge).
To escape, Tony goes into the mirror three times and each time, because Ledger was dead before they shot this part of the film, a new actor plays him.
The actors playing Tony in the Imaginarium are Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell. Each does their impression, of sorts, of how Ledger would have been in the Imaginarium but none of them pull it off. Each time one of the new actors looks at a reflection of himself, they give a quizzical stare as if to say, so this is what I (Ledger) look like in my imagination?
Anyway, the film by this time has long since lost its way and is severely handicapped by the convoluted story and back stories which are presented to try to make the film make sense.
I would have rather seen “The Dark Knight” as Ledger’s last film because this one didn’t do him justice. Actors Cole, Garfield and Troyer are interesting and amusing from time to time but the story doesn't have any breathing room because it was always trying to fill in information the audience needs to know to make the next scene make sense. I thought Waits was an interesting choice as the devil because he has a gleam in his slit eyes which make him a likely devil. Plummer plays a good drunk but there is nothing extraordinary about his performance as this wizened old soul that use to keep the world working because he and his disciples kept the story going (yes, more back story). Depp, Law and Farrell did their best but there was little in their version of Ledger which matched up or tied back to Ledger outside of obvious character lines. There wasn't a feeling that these three actors were a continuum of Ledger's character. Charles McKeown and Terry Gilliam wrote this script while Gilliam directed it. Together they didn't seem that they had a clear idea of how to tell this story in a way that it sparked imagination; and wasn't this the point?
Overall: The film is overly convoluted and lacking in imagination. As much as I wanted to get into it because some of the Imaginarium sequences were fun and interestingly filmed, I felt like I needed to say goodbye and good riddance.