Movie Title: Now You See Me
Director: Louis Leterrier
Date Released: May 31, 2013
Date Seen: June 3rd, 2013
Seen With: Dad
Part 1 – Spoiler Free Quickie Review
This movie follows four magicians known as the Four Horsemen as they preform amazing tricks such as robbing a bank halfway across the country. We see the FBI agents trying to put a stop to their tricks, figure out how they did it, and we see the Four Horsemen go from unknown street magicians to famous overnight, working for an unknown person giving them the plans to this grand trick.
The movie was exactly what I wanted and as good as I expected it to be – which was just that – good. It wasn’t amazing, but it wasn’t bad either. It kept me entertained, while being slightly predictable if you paid attention, but did still manage to keep one plot point a surprise to me (probably because it was minor and I didn’t think about it too much at the time). All the actors did well, I wasn’t distracted by any of their performances or overly amazed by any performance. Again, it was the realm of “good enough”. Mark Ruffalo’s character, the FBI agent, was interesting, but I just love him a lot so really anything he’s in, I’m down. We also have baby Franco (James Franco’s little brother), who does a pretty good job in his role. He’s getting better, so props to him.
There is two things that annoyed me about the movie. One being that there is an unnecessary love line added. To me, it felt like they wanted there to be more of a romance between Isla Fisher’s character and Jesse Eisenberg’s character, but the actors didn’t have much chemistry, so they kind of changed their story a bit and added the other romance line. I could be wrong, but it just felt so weird and pointless that that’s what I thought had happened. Another thing is that the director LOVES shots of people all standing at weird angles in the same shot, but kind of in a line. You could play a drinking game with how many times that sort of shot set up happens.
The magic tricks are pretty cool, although I will say the trailer has essentially shown you all of them. Even the “big” one. That was disappointing. But again, still a good enough movie to go see.
Part 2 – In Depth Spoiler Ridden Review
So, I’m sure most of you have come to this part of the review because you want to know if the magic is real or not, or how are they doing the tricks, like the one you see in the preview.
It’s just what you expect from magic, illusion, trickery, etc. They explain every trick except for maybe 1, they don’t explicitly show you how they did but it’s clearly another illusion. Morgan Freeman’s character tells you how most of the other tricks are done (since his character is an ex magician exposing magicians tricks now). The bank robbery trick for example, they of course selected that French guy NOT randomly at all, had a complete replica of his bank vault under the floor, he fell into it, thought he was in his actual bank because he had been previously hypnotized, and the money that falls on the crowd was real money – that they had previously robbed from the bank in France. Again, that is also explained better than I did here. It’s very unbelievable that all of this would actually work, but hey, whatever. In the moment of the movie I believed and accepted everything, it is only now that I think about it afterwards that I realize how unrealistic it was.
Overall: 7/10
Despite being a bit predictable, it’s still a very fun ride and cool to watch them do their tricks. I’d go see it or Netflix watch it, definitely.
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