Magic and movies have always been closely related. I’m quick to recall the corelation being made the most evident in 2011’s Hugo where we see the birth of narrative filmmaking coming from a love of magic and the use of, as this film puts it, “misdirection for the sake of entertainment”.
Now You See Me isn’t the top class storytelling feature that will bend your brain twenty ways from Sunday in relation to general ideas put on display or roller coaster plot twisting adventures, it will however distract you long enough to be entertained for the full near two hour runtime, which is more than I can say for a lot of the current selections available for our viewing pleasure at the cinema.
In a reality where magicians become relevant again — sometimes I wish this could happen — four very different minds come together to form a magical team called The Four Horsemen. The team is made up of Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), Henley Reeves (Isla Fischer) and J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg) and they become a hit. Under the sponsorship of Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine) they go on to put on amazingly grand shows — which includes robbing banks — which puts the likes of Det. Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) and Interpol Agent Alma Dray (Melanie Laurent) on their tale attempting to prove that they did it.
If you’ve been able to keep track of the names thusfar, I applaud you. At it’s core this film is a weird spin on an Ocean’s Eleven style heist movie with magic at the forefront. Just like in the 90s when we would sit at home watching HBO Specials of the likes of David Copperfield we end up amazed at the showmanship that these magicians put on display as we’re proven their trade craft as well as general varying usefulness from skill to skill; it’s the very typical band of misfits for a specific goal plot line. Unlike those films however, not even our team knows what their after it would seem. Robbing banks and billionaires are bits of a much bigger twist awaiting us all at the end but that’s barely the point of this whole exercise.
As the film itself does repeatedly asking us, like all close up magicians do, to look closer trying to find the point where the magic dissolves away and we see the trick of it all we find ourselves lost in details and end up being fooled even more. The point of this film isn’t to try and figure out that one final pin of trickery that we’re supposed to miss but to accept that this magical act can happen, that things out of our realm of understanding are possible and it works. Just like at the end of Ocean’s Eleven when Danny and the crew walk out of the casino with all the targets in hand we’re amazed and we eventually BEG for an explanation of HOW this all happened, sadly the film gives it to us but just like with Ocean’s Eleven the filmmakers were able to misdirect us enough and able to create enough entertainment during that misdirection that we don’t care that we were tricked.
While the film does suffer from some general plot contrivances and character arc cliches here and there — a lot to do with the character Mark Ruffalo plays — I’m willing to forgive it to a point. It’s almost as if once we’ve bought into these characters for our band of magical thieves and we enjoy them this much it’s hard for me to then start asking the writers to go that extra mile to make the police actually smart enough to follow them. And like many movies in this style it’s final twist is one that irks me, but also very much like my aforementioned forgiving of poorly written characters I forgive it of this because it already won me over and at that point I’m done being perfectly critical of it all.
Like many films it’s not perfect, but at the same time it’s also crowd-pleasing to a fault.