Film Review: Now You See Me

Now You See Me centers around a group of magicians who are pulled together by an unknown party for an unknown purpose when they each get a mysterious tarot card. The foursome is composed of J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), a cocky street magician, Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), Atlas’s ex-assistant who has her own death-defying act, Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), a down-on-his-luck mentalist and Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), who uses his knack for misdirection as a pickpocket. After a brief introduction the movie picks up a year later with the illusionists in a single act: The Four Horsemen.

The group uses large-scale illusions to rob banks, seemingly for little reason. The Horsemen’s only profit from their heists is increased popularity. The trailer would have you believe the Horsemen are Robinhood-type vigilantes, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Technically, they are, but the plot is so muddled that it doesn’t really matter.

If you strip Now You See Me down to its core, it’s about an FBI agent (Mark Ruffalo) trying to catch the Horsemen after their first heist, which does result in some excellent chase scenes full of car flips. Unfortunately, Ruffalo’s character brings with him a painfully French female Interpol agent (Melanie Laurent) who serves no purpose but as an unnecessary love interest.

Now You See Me is a gargantuan moving puzzle of action adventure, mystery and fantasy, but the pieces do not quite fit together. There is so much flash and dazzle—not to mention a lot of nearly-nauseating spinning—that you do not know where to look. Now You See Me depends on misdirection, but it creates a bit too much confusion. The audience should always know what the outcome of a trick is going to be. The key hidden up the sleeve should not be shown, but it should be clear that the chains will be broken. The problem with Now You See Me is that the mystery is in the wrong place. While it clearly spells out—with the help of Morgan Freeman as a professional magic-debunker—how each heist was accomplished, the movie leaves the bigger questions unanswered. It is intentional, but it leaves you dissatisfied. I and the two friends with whom I saw the film each left the theater with an entirely different idea of what had happened and why. A little secrecy is sometimes good, especially in a movie about magic, but Now You See Me leaves the audience feeling completely in the dark.

That being said, Now You See Me is still an incredibly fun, fast-paced film. The illusions are magnificent and compelling, if unbelievable. But is that not what magic is all about?