Review of Now You See Me (2013) by Stevenf — 01 Nov 2013

This magician-fuelled attempt at being a thriller constantly reminds the viewer that while something is going on here, the real thing is going on elsewhere, a distraction if you will. Well this whole film, enjoyable yet shallow, is a constant distraction, it has a lot of flashing lights and booming music to draw the attention away from a plot that is drawn out to be very complex when, it actual fact, is quite straightforward.

It always makes a point of blowing every single detail out of proportion to the point where there are intentional moments to throw the viewer of a scent, a scent that is honestly not that difficult to follow.

There is a star cast to back up such a colourful show, Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson and Dave Franco call themselves the Four Horsemen, we see them going about their day to day trickery as street hustlers and con artists, until they are mysteriously brought together as a collective group, Atlas is the showman and illusionist (Eisenberg), Merritt (Harrelson) is the mentalist who has quite a funny opening scene with a woman and her cheating husband, Henley (Fisher) is a beautiful escape artist while Jack (Franco) is a pickpocket and quite the entertaining fighter as well.

As these four are brought together and financed by the shady Tressler (Michael Caine), they pull off a ban heist from their Las Vegas show, yet the heist happens in France, after they ‘teleported’ a man from their show to the vault of said bank.

What then ensues is a race against time for the viewer, to see if they can outsmart the writers and get to the finish line of the whole plot, the illusions continue but no clear or reasonable motives ever seem to be present, the film definitely lacks in cause for these characters, particularly the role of Thaddeus (Morgan Freeman), a man who makes a living out of debunking magicians, who then decides to help out the FBI agent Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) to bring down these magicians, only problem being they cannot figure out what their next move will be.

As often impressive as the film looks and feels, it never seems anything more than just that, a nice shiny car that has no engine, it lacks the proper character direction, these four talented individuals show no real inclination of why they so desperately want to evade the police and put on a good show, no backstory whatsoever.

But despite that, the talent playing them are bang on the mark in bringing a unique approach to each performance, confidence and wonderful trickery often ensues, but can get a bit long in the tooth as there is little point to a lot of it.

This is certainly a flashy and in your face technique, delivered through a lot of dizzy camera movements and showmanship, yet drag it all away and there is still something worth seeing here, but it gets lost in all the glamour of trying to put on a big show, this ultimately prevents the film from being as enjoyable as it could have been, it has its thrills, but tries too hard to deliver more in the process.