I'm trying really hard not to watch movies that'll make me cynical. There are so many great movies still being made, so many great stories still being told, it seems counterproductive to waste my time on some film that'll irk me. But I did it anyway, I watched NOW YOU SEE ME. It did irk me because it's a movie that contains good ideas, but that's not concerned about exploiting them, because it believes it contains only one: THIEVING MAGICIANS!! Long time readers know that whatever movie/book/story that thinks I'm an idiot will piss me off. NOW YOU SEE ME won a merit badge in that regards. Because THIEVING MAGICIANS!!
Now it's actually a good idea to make a movie about thieving magicians, but you need more than that to make it work. So Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) and Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) *. Are street magicians with each their specialty and borderline crooks. Well, they are crooks, but they don't systematically skim every client. One day, they get a mysterious call from an unknown party, to be part of a mysterious project. One year later, they are performing in Las Vegas as ''The Four Horsemen'' and develop this controversial number where they rob a bank, halfway across the world, which catches the FBI's attention. The four magicians are sponsored by an insurance mogul named Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine), yet they seem to receive their instruction from a different source and nobody is really sure what their endgame is.
My biggest complain about NOW YOU SEE ME is the quality of the scenario. Take a movie with a similar intent, for example OCEAN'S ELEVEN, where the whole point is to marvel at the cleverness of its protagonists. As thin as the backstory was in that movie, it worked. Danny Ocean was fresh out of the joint, was pissed at Terry Benedict for dating his wife and has his awesome, debonnaire sidekick Rusty Ryan, a lifelong, passionate thief who was itching for some action. OCEAN'S ELEVEN is about an opportunity drawing and the subsequent deconstruction of how this opportunity is seized and transformed into an awesome heist. It's simple, Hollywoodian, action-packed, proactive and it works beautifully.
Somebody forgot you need to be in three dimensions to be sexy.
But there is none of these fuel-efficient ideas in this movie that is yet eerily similar in intent. The magic numbers has this Criss Angel ''fuck, it has to be staged'' quality to them, the characters are nothing more than embodiment of their specialties who are blindly following instructions to pull of spectacular heists while not taking a moral stance on what they do. ''I was just following instructions'' was a very popular excuse at the Nuremberg Trials, you know? Even the support cast is flat. Jaded Cop (Mark Ruffalo) can only say the most ''jaded cop'' things. Outside of financial gain, Morgan Freeman's character has poor logical justifications for houding magicians across America and revealing their tricks. Plus, their attempted to make Morgan sexy again. Gross. Anybody remembers how good he was playing grandfathers and last-day-of-work cops? The worst part is this flatness serves a purpose that I'm not going to talk about, because I would spoil the movie.
NOW YOU SEE ME is not without interest, though. It's a movie that is of its time, that speaks of America's infatuation with entertainment. Today's entertainers are worshipped by the masses, hounded by paparazzis, have their lives exposes in gossip magazines and inspire stories like NOW YOU SEE ME. Why would entertainers play Robin Hood for the disenfranchised masses? Most people working in one or another sphere of entertainment have difficulty making ends meet, so the idea of having a sponsored magician disregarding his meal ticket to blindly follow instructions from a total unknown out of pure theoretical interest for his job strikes me as quite the romantic idea. But such selfless, passionate entertainers are a lie. A lie we need to tell ourselves and the absolute lack of resolution regarding these characters speak of this strange need NOW YOU SEE ME fulfills in our collective consciousness. It's a bit of a sick fantasy, wishing to be saved and entertained at the same time.
I have to give it to director Louis Leterrier. If he hadn't directed this movie so much confidence and gusto, I probably wouldn't have had so much pleasure picking it apart. But NOW YOU SEE ME is not very good. Well, it's not bad either. It has a sense of spectacle, well-choreographed scenes, cohesiveness and it resists the evil temptations of shaky cam. It's a technically super competent film, so it's pleasant to watch, yet it's shallow and lazy. In the end, THIEVING MAGICIANS!! is not a compelling enough argument to fill two hours of my time, but ENTERTAINER HERO!!! kind of was, in its own twisted way. NOW YOU SEE ME is unlikely to beat father time, but has an interesting, unwitting sense of zeigeist about it.
* Awesome names, I know.
