Usually when I see film I tend to form a fairly consistent
opinion of it shortly after seeing it, then maybe, a second viewing may change
my opinion of it, The Master is an
example of this (No, i’m not comparing Now
You See Me with The Master), where
my opinion actually improved. But with Now
You See Me, I just left with the feeling of I JUST DON’T CARE.
The plot of the film is fairly straight forward, despite
what the trailers promise (they also give away a ridiculous amount of the plot
and the twists), it has none of the wit and ingenuity of the great heist films
that work on similar ideas, such as Oceans
Eleven or the narrative complexity of The
Prestige.
We follow four magicians, brought together for some long
drawn out, and oh my is it, scam/trick/heist/just-get-on-with-it that you have
to wait for the end to see it all pan out.
I would go through the characters and give you a breakdown
of the performance, but frankly most of them are largely forgettable, two
dimensional and uninteresting that I won’t waste your time, like the writers
and director did with the insane amount of talent they had in their cast.
It is unfair to be hard on the cast, apart from their
decision to sign on, although this one of these scripts that maybe looks great
on the page, but the lack of any real depth to their characters should have
stood out. Greats like Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are wasted, then
discarded at points in the film.
Jesse Eisenberg, whose normal style of witty delivery has
been a pleasure to watch in his previous films, especially The Social Network, is wasted here on lines that are just clever
for the sake of being clever, but aren’t actually clever. Maybe if someone else
had been the head magician/person in charge it wouldn’t have seen so out of
place.
Woody Harrelson is probably the only character who lives up
to his potential, and this is because of how laid back and spot on his delivery
is. This is in spite of the overtly cocky dialogue he is given, Harrelson has
to work hard to make it entertaining.
The visuals which are interesting during the first act,
begin to bore you, to the point where at the climax, it feels like a giant
outdoor version of the Who wants to be a
millionaire? Set, with massive spotlights turning on and off every few
seconds accompanied by loud music and sound effects that would make Michael Bay
think about toning it down.
With any kind of magic/heist film there is a lot of sleight
of hand visually and suspension of disbelief required, but here the level
needed is farcical. Getting more and more ridiculous as we progress from trick
to trick. Another frustration, is that too much of the technology featured in
the final trick is unexplained, where they had previously outlined everything,
here they blissfully omit. It is important to play fair, to a degree with the
audience with plots like this, but here they don’t and it just comes across as
cheap. They asked questions they didn’t have the answer to.
Unlike World War Z
where it was the last half an hour that I felt let it down, here after a
somewhat bearable first 25 minutes, the film nose dives into boredom, smugness
and delusions of grandeur as it tricks itself into thinking that something interesting
is happening on the screen, and that you should care what happens. You shouldn’t.
