Now You See Me is a really good, bad movie. It’s in my wheelhouse, I love heist movies. It’s a new twist on heist movies which gives the movie a few more points from me as well. The thieves are master illusionists! So you have the combination of theft and magic, but the problem is you can’t mix magic like this with a Hollywood movie. All the major tricks come down to the explaination of “that’s computer generated”.
The magic of magic is seeing something unbelievable happen in front of you and it looks completely legit. You struggle to figure out the trick. When people are disappearing, floating around or throwing clearly digital objects, that needed suspension of disbelief is gone.
That’s not to say the actors aren’t doing any slight of hand, it’s just that the pay offs of the big “illusions” don’t hold any weight because so much was done in post production. You see three major heists and the main beats of how they were done are explained. Clearly a lot of consultation from magicians was done as the planning and complexity of the illusions are great and plausible (there’s a lot of built sets, forced perspective, misdirection, mirrors and the like shown) but there’s always that “computer generated” out for everything (the giant mirror used for one of the heists is broken and it’s clearly CG).
Even as I could never get passed all of the above, it’s still a fun movie that I enjoyed. The Feds chase after a group of illusionists (dubbed The Four Horseman) who steal money in their live performances and give it away to the audience. It’s a wild concept, taking bank heists and Robin Hood to a new level. The cast is good, although Jesse Eisenberg falls into his Social Network smarmy act and while Dave Franco is pushed to the back for the most of the movie, he gets far and away the best action set piece. Morgan Freeman is also Morgan Freeman, not sure why they wanted him to play himself.
The reveal at the end of the movie is more of a shoulder shrug than a twist. I don’t think it was necessary. You could have had that character be known from the start and change the beginning of the movie to accommodate that and you’d wind up with a better movie in the end. There is a set up for a sequel and there has been industry talk of one…despite all the complaining I’m doing, I’d watch it.