Directed by:
Louis LeterrierCinematography:
Larry FongComposer:
Brian TylerCast:
Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, Dave Franco, Mélanie Laurent, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Michael Kelly, Common (more)VOD (5)
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In this visually spectacular blend of astonishing illusions and exhilarating action from director Louis Leterrier, four talented magicians mesmerise an international audience with a series of bold and original heists, all the while pursuing a hidden agenda that has the FBI and Interpol scrambling to anticipate their next move. (Entertainment One)
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A heist movie from which someone stole the logic. The quintet (!) of screenwriters tried to outsmart viewers, but the gentlemen wound up outsmarting themselves. The necessary extent of viewers’ incredulity that better films about scams consciously work with has been exceeded many times over in Now You See Me. Not even the illusionists can be believed, as they act in conflict with the initial presentation of their characters after a jump in time (we don’t learn much more about them during the rest of the film), nor can their tricks, because they are mostly conjured up with CGI, which breaks the bond between their feats and reality. The magic shows are basically just an excuse for drawn-out and poorly edited action scenes. The weak final justification for the meaning of each of the performances is just another of the countless attempts at misdirection, specifically the effort to evoke the impression that each of the shows was something more than an autonomous attraction. Perhaps this is part of a well-thought-out whole governed by rules that don’t change on the fly and whose individual parts are not connected using a confounding number of coincidences and assumptions that a particular person will only react to a particular situation in one particular way and not another. The final twist robs the film of any remaining shreds of logical coherence. No, I didn’t seriously expect such an ending, because it lacked any logic in relation to the preceding 100 minutes. Instead of the feeling that I had been cleverly outsmarted (the wow effect), there was bitter laughter at someone’s ability to sacrifice all of the story’s believability and meaningfulness to the God of Surprise (the WTF effect). Every narrative device serves to deceive viewers to such an extent that we are constantly aware of the film’s falsity, so its conjuring tricks just don’t work. The Prestige was based on a quite similar principle (we will reveal the rules of the game to you and then we will outfox you anyway), but in that film, the trick was underpinned by the preceding two hours of action. In Nolan’s film, the twist wasn’t conjured up out of screenwriting cluelessness just before the end only so that film could somehow be concluded. In Now You See Me, it is – starting with the way it’s stated in the film’s title – too obvious that we are the intended marks. Something like that might work in Copperfield’s live show, but in a live-action feature film, it ultimately causes the film to retroactively lose meaning because it comes off as just an illusion. The actors also do a utilitarian job. Most of them were cast solely to raise the film’s level of prestige and to serve the same decorative and distracting purpose that one of the characters attributes to a magician’s attractive assistant. Louis Leterrier himself is just such an assistant, but he’s an assistant without a magician. He diligently diverts our attention so that in the end he can artlessly concede in the end that the main content of his performance was the actual act of distracting us. Appendix: The most ridiculous thing is the attempt to shoehorn criticism of unjust social conditions (an apparent echo of Occupy Wall Street) into Now You See Me, a film that defends scam artists and punishes those who bring attention to the scam. 40%
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A very complicated, but at the same time quite imaginative story. And the actors are the icing on the cake. They exuded that kind of a magician’s arrogance and cunning with which their idea grew and fell. But I must say that it wasn’t because of all this that I gave this movie four stars. If that was all the movie had, I would have settled on two. I was totally confused by the story. I, however, enjoyed the way this film was made. The director clearly put a lot of effort into this, to show this project was a dream come true for him. But the best and most beautiful thing about this movie was Mélanie Laurent. I could watch her all day. And if the magicians had chosen her for the disappearing act, I would’ve written an indignant letter all the way to Hollywood, demanding an explanation. Fortunately, she showed all of her French elegance and grace to my complete satisfaction. It’s evident that the director, who is also French, is aware of Melánie’s charm. So even though the movie has its flaws, it also deserves praise. As a result, I was satisfied and now I’m looking forward to a sequel.
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I sat down and let the deception and magic take over and enjoyed it. I really did. It had momentum, it had interesting characters, and I was just waiting to see how it culminated. And it did, beautifully, leaving some viewers slightly dissatisfied. A nice film that managed to surprise me halfway through. I'm curious to see the sequel, hopefully it will be at least as entertaining as this film.
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Compared to The Prestige, it looks like an opening act created by art school students, and I don’t consider Nolan’s highly-praised opus to be great. Unfortunately, Now You See Me plods along from the very first moment, and while there are a bunch of good actors and they're well cast, it's a typical consumer Hollywood commercial from start to finish without a shred of invention. And when, in the course of the film, you discover that there's going to be some devilish subterfuge and the magic tricks are not solved by wit and ingenuity, but by visual effects, something is wrong. So average for the entertaining ensemble of stars and its brisk pace.
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Though Now You See Me tries to give the impression of being a clever and sophisticated crime-thriller with illusionists, it is actually a rather dull and half-baked tale full of holes, narrative nonsense and moronic twists dressed up in a superficially attractive and maximally spectacular coat in the form of action-oriented editing, flashy visuals, a lot of famous actors and thumping music, which is apparently meant to lull viewers to sleep so that they don’t start thinking about the plot. Of course, it would perhaps be possible to make an entertaining and high-quality film about how four extravagant showmen commit entirely absurd robberies and disguise them as magic shows. But then it wouldn’t have been possible for the plot of Now You See Me to include a completely serious storyline involving a Secret Service who is trying to investigate their case in a factual way and the character of the expert on magic who tries to somehow logically explain the bizarre illusions to him, but ends up explaining them in a way that would be completely impracticable in real life. The atmosphere of the magic performances is thus completely ruined by the film, because while you can certainly admire the magicians for their nimble hands and the precision of their staging, both of these elements were unfortunately replaced with megalomaniacal computer tricks and editing. Which definitely produces the desired “wow” effect for a brief moment, but it takes a lot away from the believability of the overall magical stylization.
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