Keep Your Eye on the Ball that Never Was

Now You See MeDirected by Louis Leterrier
Two Stars

By Jon Fisher

Films about magic walk a perilous line. These usually go down one of two roads –they try to flummox the viewer by pretending to be a magic trick in and of itself (thereby trying to gain some ‘art’ cred), or they settle for being disposable, (hopefully) enjoyable ‘light’ options for the weekend trip to the movies.

Now You See Me is certainly fits into one of those categories. It’s unashamedly popcorn. It becomes clear after the opening scene or two that Now You See Me will have nothing underneath the surface. The camera swoops, swirls and dances. Pretty images of buildings and crowds are displayed on the cinema wall. A series of sarcastic, fast-talking, smug characters are introduced to us. They’re all excellent at fooling people. We catch on pretty quick that this movie will be about them trying, in increasingly ‘wow!’ing ways, fooling their hapless pursuant. It isn’t initially clear if this movie is trying to go the route of the vastly superior The Prestige in trying to one-up us as viewers, but as long as the shiny swooping images of city skylines and attractive cast members continue, we don’t much care.

The plot is stock-standard stuff for a studio heist/action flick – a group of illusionists and mentalists are brought together by an unknown figure. They are tasked with creating general mischief (stealing from banks, draining the bank account of a well-known Evil One-Percenter) via a series of glossy, slightly irritating magic shows. After they rob a French bank ‘during’ a show in Las Vegas (quotation marks very deliberate), police officer Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo in full “archetypical surly cop” mode) and Interpol agent Alma Drey (the luminous Melanie Laurent) pick up the case to nab these crooks. They find it difficult to manage because the perps appear to genuinely have magical powers etc etc.

Now You See Me has a tendency to be irritating, although it should be said that large swathes of the movie washed passed me harmlessly. As always with these movies, it’s fine for its protagonists and the events surrounding them to be completely vacuous and to fail to hold up to any kind of rational scrutiny – as long as the characters are likable and/or interesting. They are neither. They have irritating, contrived names like “J. Daniel Atlas” and “Merritt McKinney”. They speak unnaturally, consistently sounding like lines from the trailer for the movie they are in rather than real human beings.

Jesse Eisenberg takes the smug persona he invoked in The Social Network and ramps it up to ten, while the script he is given drains the character of any complexity. Morgan Freeman pops up in a bizarre, jarring role that only exists so that he can explain what is happening in the movie in his deep, sombre baritone.

The film’s female characters are routinely humiliated and degraded by the men around them. Their response seems to be to grovel more deeply, fall in love more madly, and to accept their roles as the sidekicks. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Now You See Me hates women, but it certainly doesn’t go out of its way to make them as intelligent, crafty and resilient as their male counterparts. Then again, Now You See Me presents everyone in it as a cardboard cut-out bereft of any real humanity, so best to go a little easy on the misogyny accusations.

As it turns out, Now You See Me is one of those magic movies that tries to turn itself into a magic trick. The finale, the big reveal, is… completely nonsensical.

Now You See Me is 'well shot' by director Louis Leterrier (who previously made the less-than-stupendous Clash of the Titans, but also made the benignly enjoyable Transporter films). Meaning that, even if the characters aren’t worth a minute of our time and the plot doesn’t add up, most of this film looks and sounds good technically. Some might say that’s reason enough to venture out to see it – it looks good, and when no thought is applied, even has a couple of satisfying twists and turns. But to concede that Now You See Me is a good movie is to concede that you only like movies to watch nice images projected onto a screen… and I can’t go for that.