REVIEW: Now You See Me

6/10 - Boom! KaBlam! Alakazam! I have made a cow appear! (And $12 is gone from your wallet)

I think the movie makers believe magic is real.

Really real. Not showmanship, like Harry Potter real.

This makes for a really bad movie when the premise is cops trying to debunk a magic trick, because some magicians robbed a bank. It was MAGIC.

Now You See Me goes for the smart, mysterious, caper feel of Ocean's Eleven. I think that's what audiences want too, they certainly showed up in theaters for it. Instead of following creating and executing the heist (like in Ocean's), the movie centers around and follows the guy chasing them. And that guy is boring.

I, too, falsely presumed that the four magicians would be the stars of this movie, something anyone who sees the poster or trailer would be inclined to think. Big name actors, who are clearly the smart ones, with a plan. I was wrong. The "Four Horsemen" are a red herring, acting as nothing but an intermediary. They are following orders to some McGuffin ending, which isn't even clear in the end. After the first 20 minutes, their role is marginalized and those four characters no longer make decisions. Meaning they are useless. I watched a whole movie about these useless people.

Now You See Me is actually about Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) running around trying to "solve their crimes" through no investigatory technique or intelligence. Seriously, this is the protagonist, the dumbest person in the movie. There's also Morgan Freeman, who can figure out magic tricks (thank god someone in this movie can) and Melanie Laurent who plays a lady following Mark Ruffalo around. She's a great actress and is one of the only characters in the movie with charisma.

The movie itself falls apart after the first act. From the trailer it's clear that four magicians rob a bank during their stage act. This is promptly investigated, and rather quickly, explained. The next two acts try to replicate this, but don't do a good job. Neither the "illusions" or the "explanations" have any impact. I really want more of what was promised at the beginning. The story of the Four Horsemen coming together, and planning this would be wildly entertaining. The sleek magic act was really enjoyable to watch. It's sad that the magic really ends when the movie begins. The story should be straightforward, but becomes muddled with unclear character motivations, and false suspicion.

I think the actual magic is probably the worst element, distracting from, and ruining the movie. The magic illusions don't even need to be explained, they just needs to be plausible. Isla Fisher's character is constantly doing CGI tricks, to my utter annoyance and frustration. There is a long, documented history of real magicians creating elaborate and inventive illusions. I have a hard time believing many of them used post-production computer generated effects.

Not to mention that becoming a magician makes you a superhero! The magicians in Now You See Me not only gain strength and agility, but Tony Stark like technology, and some sort of telekinesis. I'm not making this up, I guess the writers couldn't conceive of what magic a magician could pull on other magicians, so they just made impossible things happen.

To round it out (hopefully I can summarize this in a way that won't spoil anything) the ending sucks. The ending to a caper like this should be highly anticipated with clues and hints, but wasn't. It's simply a convenient way to wrap up the story, and I think it's lazy and makes this movie cheap. It looks down on the audience instead of engaging them. I feel like this is a prime example of endings gone wrong, but I'll save that essay for another day.

Poof! The cow I made appear, just disappeared. Are you disappointed? I was.

IMDB - Now You See Me (7.3)
Wikipedia - Now You See Me
Rotten Tomatoes - Now You See Me (49%)
Amazon.ca - Now You See Me