I will say that the corridor fight in the hotel was fucking amazing, I've never seen anything like it. Joseph Gordon-Levitt was fucking badass in the movie, but his character really had no personality. He was just there to fulfill a certain purpose and look cool.
You look at heist movies, and the characters always have personalities and quirks, even if it's just fulfilling a certain type. The only guy with any sort of discernible personality in Inception was Tom Hardy.
I really dug The Prestige in how it handled the rivalry between the Jackman and Bale characters. It's interesting how Nolan effectively reverses the positions of the characters from the way they were in the novel. In the novel, the Jackman character is definitely the more sympathetic of the two, and the Bale character comes off as sad, archaic and pathetic.
Whereas in the movie, you can tell Nolan has respect for the dedication Bale's character(s) has for the craft of magic, whereas not so much for Jackman, who has no originality, no real inspiration, but instead tries to one-up Bale through pure expenditure of money. There's no magic to Jackman's act, no real illusion , which makes him, paradoxically, a huge phony in regards to the art of prestidigitation.
