Movie Magic, but No Actual Magic

I’m not going to try and pretend with this review: I’ve never actually liked the Now You See Me films. For whatever reason these movies caught on for a brief amount of time and the swirling rumors about continuations for the franchise still, somehow, are treated like actual news. Yes, the first film in the series made $351.7 Mil during its run at the Box office, and that was on a budget of just $75 Mil. It was a clear winner, financially speaking, and Hollywood never likes to let a potential franchise die. But, really, does anyone actually like these films?

I couldn’t muster the energy to give this film a fair shake, coming back to it so many years later, so my time with it was more of a hate watch, if I’m being honest. Had the film somehow been good, and I realized it was this misjudged wonder, I would admit to that. I can often find something to like in everything I watch, even when the work is pretty shitty. But with Now You See Me, the first film in a series of three (and growing) movies, it’s really hard to find anything nice to say because this is just such a hollow and empty exercise in blockbuster filmmaking.

Like, conceptually the film could be interesting. A quartet of magicians that come together to rob banks while pulling elaborate illusions sounds great. The execution of this film, though, is lacking on all fronts. It’s hard to care about anything going on in a film this overstuffed with characters, twists, turns, and fakeouts. It’s like if the Marvel Cinematic UniverseWhen it first began in 2008 with a little film called Iron Man no one suspected the empire that would follow. Superhero movies in the past, especially those not featuring either Batman or Superman, were usually terrible. And yet, Iron Man would lead to a long series of successful films, launching the most successful cinema brand in history: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. started not with Iron Man or Captain America: The First Avenger but with The Avengers and then said, “hey, you’ll like all these characters, we swear. Just try and keep up.” If you want us to care about your characters and your story then you have to invest in it and Now You See Me never does.

We’re introduced to our quartet of magicians one by one. J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg) is a street magician with a decent online following. Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) is Atlas’s former assistant who has gone on to become a solid performer in her own right. Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson) is a formerly famous mentalist who hit rough times years earlier and has been clawing his way back. And Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) is a conman with fast hands, grifting people and stealing their cash. The four of them all receive tarot cards with an address printed on them, directing them to the same time and place where they all meet and are introduced to the heist of all heists.

One year later the four of them have become the biggest magic act in the world, all thanks to their rich benefactor, Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine). During their biggest show yet they seemingly rob a bank halfway across the world, and this gets the attention of both FBI Agent Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) and Interpol Agent Alma Dray (Mélanie Laurent). Now the chase is as the agents try to catch the magicians in the act as the quartet, now dubbed the Four Horsemen, continue robbing from the rich and giving to their audiences across a series of coordinated stunts.

There are a number of flaws with Now You See Me, but the biggest is the fact that the film thinks it’s really smart when it is, in fact, really stupid. The movie wants you to invest in the story of the Four Horsemen, as well as the FBI agent, and everyone else chasing after, but it never actually puts in any effort to develop the characters, or the story, and actually make you care. Instead of doing the legwork (which, in fairness, would have really required a number of films to do properly considering how much story is glossed over here) the film shorthands everything, info dumping when it can’t paper over plot, just so that it can keep pushing forward to an ending that, quite obviously was decided first before the script was written.

The movie feels like a writing exercise where the ending was decided first and then the rest of the script was written backwards from there. Why are the Four Horsemen robbing people: because they’re trying to get into a secret organization of elite magicians, The Eye, that is only mentioned late in the film and barely acts as a motivator for most of the film. But we need The Eye so we can reveal the mastermind behind everything. And the only way that the mastermind makes sense is if various little clues are dropped along during the story, even if all of those clues contradict everything we know about the story up to that point.

None of the twists work, and that’s because the film never develops them. When the mastermind of the whole operation is finally revealed (spoilers for a thirteen year old movie, it’s the FBI agent that has been desperate to catch the magicians, even nearly shooting them at one point despite how this would, you know, ruin his whole scheme) it makes the viewers eyes roll back into their head. And that’s just one twist out of dozens that make no sense. At each turn the film plays like its twists are smart, but if you stop and think about any of them for even fifteen seconds, you realize nothing makes sense and the film is incredibly stupid.

But I’d probably be willing to let the stupidity of the film go if I liked the characters. Now You See Me, though, never actually develops its characters. Each is introduced quickly and defined by one trait – Atlas is egotistical, McKinney is also egotistical, Henley is pretty, Jack is the kid – and then the film never does anything further with their personalities after that. For instance, why are we shown that Henley is an escape artist during her introduction when she’s never shown doing any kind of escape work again after that? Why are we told that Henley and Atlas have a past relationship when they are never given a will they / won’t they story? These characters are all cyphers, dropped in so the film could call them “The Four Horsemen” (which has no relation to anything except that it sounds cool) and then have them commit heists.

And even when it comes to the heists the film doesn’t do real leg work, it just cheats. It uses CGI and movie magic for most of its tricks and stunts, pushing everything outside the bounds of what stage magic could do into actual movie magic. Does the film look cool? Yes, but it also exists in this unreality where the tricks the Four Horsemen perform could never actually happen. It wants to say, “oh, everything is an illusion and there’s a clear explanation for all of it,” before then using Hollywood effects to make many impossible stunts occur. It wants to play it both ways, and ruins the illusion in the process.

All for what? A story with no depth, that constantly twists and turns to make it look intelligent when there’s no substance under it, all to tell the tale of four magicians that are little more than hollow shells of actual characters. That’s not to say that a version of this story couldn’t work, but it would have to be a drastically different film, or series of films, to do that. The movie would have to spend time with the four magicians as they learn to work together, irritating each other with their flaws before learning how to be friends. Instead of jumping ahead a year we’d have to watch as they try, and fail, and slowly gain the trust of their benefactor. We’d have to see why they’re doing what they do, and to what end, all before we actually get into the meat of the three heists they eventually do perform. We’re talking a lot of story development, all so we can actually care about anything that happens here.

But doing that wouldn’t let the film perform all its dumb little twists and turns in its overly engineer, totally empty story. It wants to jump ahead to the good bits without putting in the work to get there. As a result we have a very flashy film with no depth, devoid of any reason to care about the characters, their mission, or anything else that happens here. And by the end, with the film performing its one last twist, pulling the mask off its mastermind, the film has completely fallen apart.

This is a very slick and stylish film, make no mistake, but that’s all artifice. Underneath the CGI splendor and creative cinematography, there’s just an empty void. Now You See Me is the end result of the Hollywood system pushing style over substance, and while it worked (the film made its paper) that doesn’t make it a good film. Now You See Me is empty trash, and you have to wonder why anyone would want to see more of these films afterwards. And yet they did, as there’s two more sequels (with more on the way) and I still don’t know why.