Do you think that hypnotism is possible by merely snapping your fingers in someone’s face? Will you swallow a plot that calls for a man to hire a team of magicians to rob banks to avenge his father’s death? Can you put up with the most halfheartedly written dialogue know to man, coupled with some of the most half-assed performances ever put to film? If so, Now You See Me is the movie for you! It’s been a while since I’ve been this disappointed by a movie, but this enormous piece of shit delivers with bland characters and an overly convoluted plot that I really couldn’t care less about. God, this movie is ass.
Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Dave Franco, and Isla Fisher as four magicians who are given an express set of instructions to organize a series of three robberies over the course of a long career. Even though they have no idea who gave them the instructions, they proceed accordingly... because fuck logic. In their first performance, they teleport a French guy to a vault, where he siphons all the money back to the audience. But of course this isn’t possible, so cue Morgan Freeman coming in to do what he does best: WORDY EXPOSITION! He debases their magic, and then tells the police that they robbed the bank long beforehand to play the trick. So why weren’t they arrested or charged with anything? Eisenberg tells the police that if they arrest him, they will be admitting that magic exists. But how in the fuck does that make sense? His magic had already been proven false! The facts show that he robbed the bank! The proof, as they say, is in the motherfucking pudding!
But for whatever reason (Plotline), the lame police agent played by Mark Ruffalo lets the four of them go, and they continue to rob people using ‘magic.’ All of their actual robberies are debased by Freeman, but their stunts aren’t, and those are usually the most interesting thing in the movie. How does Isla Fisher float in a bubble across the audience? How is Woody Harrelson able to hypnotize people merely by snapping his fingers? How is it remotely feasible to pick one random guy, follow him around while planting subliminal messages in his head, and ensure that he ends up seeing your magic show on a certain day at a certain time? None of this makes an ounce of sense, but the movie doesn’t even try to explain why any of these things are happening. At the end of the day, the film owes most of its magic to the power of confusing camerawork to keep the audience distracted, not anything to do with the actual plot. In this sense, the movie is even trickier than the characters it’s about. Which is not necessarily a good thing.
The characters aren’t even remotely believable, and their dialogue is consistently stilted and dull. The only thing they have going for them are their magic tricks, but when the magic is so clearly CGI, and is not even remotely possible, the audience couldn’t care less. None of the characters interact in realistic ways, and when they do they are so stereotyped it hurts. Morgan Freeman is always the wise old man, Michael Caine is a rich British guy, and Mark Ruffalo’s police chief doesn’t know what the fuck is going on (just like every other policeman in every movie ever).
But Now You See Me’s biggest insult is its final plot twist (which I’m going to spoil for you so that you don’t have to actually sit through the movie). In the end, it turns out that Mark Ruffalo was using the four magicians to set up Morgan Freeman all along, in order to avenge his father... or something. The movie insults the audience’s intelligence on astronomical levels here. It expects us to buy that Ruffalo could possibly have conjured up this ridiculously convoluted plot to leave Freeman in ruins and make off with a buttload of cash. But not once does his character ever allude to that. I’m fine with plot twists, but there isn’t a single moment throughout the entire movie that makes you think that his character’s twist is remotely plausible. It should have at least been hinted at so that the audience’s reaction would have been “WOW” instead of “Yeah, thaaaat’s fucking ridiculous.”
Final Score for Now You See Me: 3/10 stars. The effects are cool and the story is fine, but this is really one of the year’s guiltiest pleasures. None of this movie makes even the slightest amount of sense, and if you start to think for even a second about the proceedings, you will realize how lame it all is. None of the characters act the way they should, and every part of their conversations are only for serving the plot. An associate of mine, Jay Cutler, recently pointed out that small talk is one of the things that makes movie dialogue great. But there is absolutely no small talk in Now You See Me; literally every single line someone speaks is used later for the service of unbelievably asinine plot twists. For instance, if you bother looking for a second and aren’t distracted by the pretty lights, you’ll notice that the last performance that the four magicians give is about five minutes long. It’s all concocted, it’s all bland, and the movie feels like it came off an assembly line. And at the end of the day... it did.
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