Now You See Me feels like an attempt at a new Ocean's Eleven for the new decade, a comedy-thriller heist movie with an extensive cast of actors. But here, the characters aren't professional criminals, but magicians. And their crime spree takes the form of a series of tricks they perform that set the FBI and a professional "debunker" on their trail.
The opening scene of the movie starts with such tremendous promise. A street magician played by Jesse Eisenberg (who is now forging a career out of playing smarmy and arrogant) performs a simple but clever card trick -- albeit with an extravagant reveal. The core of the trick is performed in camera, for real, with no visual effects or deceptive editing required to pull off. The apparent implication: this movie is going to treat magic realistically and use it in a heist movie! Maybe this could do for magic what Rounders did for poker! But sadly, that trick was a deception. Perhaps on some level, that's appropriate. But when most of what follows in the next two hours feels more like the sort of magic you'd learn at Hogwarts, you can't help but feel cheated.
The movie is undeniably fun and adventurous. When elements of the capers are revealed to have explainable, real world mechanics, the movie feels smart. But when things have no explanation, when the characters behave implausibly, when we get long sequences of action for action's sake... the movie feels like the dumbest of dumb summer fare. And the movie seesaws back and forth between these two modes all the way through, never "smart" long enough for you to feel it's really good overall, not "dumb" long enough for you to give up on it entirely.
Perhaps it's the efforts of the solid cast that keep you pulled in. Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson (Zombieland reunion!), Isla Fisher and Dave Franco, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman (Batman reunion!), and Mark Ruffalo... the movie doesn't hurt for recognizable faces. And yet, no one is truly exceptional in the movie, because the characters are all rather steadfastly shallow. Caine and Freeman can charm, Eisenberg and Harrelson can make you laugh, but none of it quite conjures up substance to pair with the movie's basic visceral thrills.
The result is more or less average. I'd give it a C+. But I can't help but wish for the version of this movie that had taken itself a bit more realistically while having its fun.
1 comment:
I pretty much hated this movie.
Of course, as a magician, I was hoping for "real magic" (i.e. real-world illusions) and I was quite hopeful after that first scene you mentioned. But, as you pointed out, everything else is simply impossible, and that took away a lot of the fun for me.
But even without that, the movie is a mess. Nothing ever comes into focus, you never know whom to root for (partly because the characters - and their motivations - are poorly defined), and the final twist is so preposterous that I almost got up to leave right there and then.
(Not to mention that, once you know the ending, a ton of scenes suddently don't make any sense - and they made little sense to begin with...)
So yeah, eye candy, and you get the ocular cavity that comes with it.
A rather funny epilogue:
A friend of mine torrented the movie and watched it over lunch at work. He asked me what I'd thought of it, and I said I thought it was a disjointed piece of semi-boring entertainment. "Some of the scenes are strangely assembled, aren't they?" "Yes indeed," I replied.
Well, he later found out that he'd downloaded a jumbled version of the movie (with several scenes out of sequence) put out there by the filmmakers to deter piracy.
And the crazy thing is that our conversation made total sense! One guy who'd seed a blended version of the film was telling me how he thought the movie was a jumbled mess, and I was agreeing with him.
This should tell anyone to stay away from this and - God forbid - the sequel...
FKL
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