Now You See Me

"Wait...Mad Scientist, why are you posting two movie reviews in one day? Did you do a double feature on a weeknight?" You may or may not be thinking.

The answer is no, I watched these on two separate days and I just haven't gotten around to reviewing them until now. Nevertheless, Now You See Me did have the misfortune to be the next movie I watched after The Fugitive, and, as you'll know from reading my last review, nothing was ever going to live up to that standard.

Now You See Me didn't even try. It suffered mainly from two problems, one minor and one major. The minor problem was it couldn't make up its mind about the existence of magic. There was far too much explaining for this to be a show about wizards, but also not nearly enough for it to be a satisfying show about illusionists. Besides the hypnosis, which always seemed to be real, the tricks the Horsemen did were (mostly) pretty clearly just tricks. Then things got strange at the end with "The Eye." On the one hand, "The real magic is taking four solo acts and making them work together." On the other hand...exactly how do you explain that weird Tarot card business? A movie about illusionists can't pull a stunt like that without some hint at an explanation, or the existence of an explanation...so...magic is real? What's going on?

I may or may not have been able to get over that, if not for the major problem with the movie: Every single character was completely unlikeable. By the end, I was hoping to see all of them utterly humiliated. Of course they couldn't all lose, so some of them had to win, and the twist was well played, and did shed new light on one of the characters, but...it wasn't enough. The payoff did not make up for all the brainpower I had to expend to keep up with plot developments that didn't make sense and tricks that weren't explained all in the service of characters I didn't like.

SPOILER ALERT: The other minor problem was the cell phone. I mean, how would a person possibly not notice his cell phone had been swapped with a duplicate? There's no way (that the movie ever bothered mentioning) the Horsemen could have known all his contacts, his downloaded apps, his pictures, his music, his password, his voicemail greeting, etc. etc. Even if they did manage to do something fancy with the sim card, which I don't think they did, how would they even know what kind of cell phone he had? And yes, I realize he was playing along and rigging the game the whole time, but why would no one around him find it suspicious that it took him so long to realize his phone was not really his phone? END SPOILER

I like to fix movies, but I don't know if there was anything that could be done for this one. The characters would have all had to be completely redone. Once that was taken care of...I'm guessing a lot of other problems would have emerged. I think the only hope would have been a total re-write that somehow managed to result in Tommy Lee Jones chasing Harrison Ford.