Magic is a tenuous thing. See it from the right angle and for a miraculous moment you’d believe that the impossible is possible as you’re dumbfounded by the wonders laid out before you. However, come at it from the wrong approach and you’ll see how the trick was done as misdirection, mirrors and trick panels all seem embarrassingly obvious and your childlike joy diminishes as fast as a fart in a hurricane.
It’s rather fitting then, that magician-themed thriller, Now You See Me comes with a similar effect. Enter Louis Leterrier’s energetic answer to Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven series with a lust to be wowed, dazzled and buffeted by a near-constant array of twists and you’ll probably be cackling in childlike glee. However, if you come to the party armed to the teeth with weapon’s grade cynicism then you’re just going to sit there getting ever more annoyed at the flamboyant bollocks that’s being presented before you. But that’s the thing about magic, isn’t it? It’s all about perspective.
Four separate magicians, all experts in their chosen fields of abracadabra, each are slipped a mysterious tarot card that summons them to New York. The group – which contains egotistical illusionist J. Daniel Atlas, assistant turned escape artist Henley Reeves, aging mentalist Merritt McKinney and fast fingered card shark Jack Wilder – all arrive at the same, abandoned apartment to discover that it contains blueprints, plans and orders to embark on something ludicrously epic. A year later, we find that the quartet has taken the world by storm under the collective name of the Four Horseman who have been following the plans laid out by their mysterious benefactor and are sponsored by insurance magnate Arthur Tressler.
In front of a screaming audience, the Horsemen claim to do the impossible, they’re going to pick a random member of the audience and rob the vault of the bank that they’re with. However, things seem even more impossible when the man they select banks in Paris, but that doesn’t seem to deter the quartet as they seemingly pull off a magical heist that sees the volunteer get seemingly zapped over to France, only to have the contents of the vault dispersed over the roaring crowd in Las Vegas.
Obviously, the cops get involved led by the short tempered FBI agent Dylan Rhodes and open minded Interpol detective Alma Dray, but soon they find themselves regularly bamboozled by the Horsemen who are armed with alibis. However, while the increasingly frustrated Rhodes fails to make anything stick, the quartet plan their next big show which will no doubt involve yet another sizable robbery in plain sight.
But it seems that even the Horsemen themselves don’t even have all the answers as their faceless benefactor has much bigger plans for all involved. Can Rhodes, while in cahoots with professional debunker Thaddeus Bradley, manage to figure out the Horseman before their glitzy endgame comes into play?
I have to say, on my first viewing of Now You See Me, I very much approached the film in the grouchy mood of a cynic and promptly found to movie to be incredibly obnoxious. Blazing at you with the blinding smugness of a thousand Robert Downey Jrs, the movie starts agressively absurd and then just gets more exaggerated as it goes on. Anyone expecting a more shrewd, narrow-eyed glimpse of magic along the lines of The Prestige was roundly out of luck as Leterrier instead delivered a blinding razzmatazz that proudly ignored anything remotely approaching logic while delivering glib setpieces and ludicrous rug pulls.
I’ll admit, I did approach that flick in a mood that could be charitably described as grouchy all those years ago, however, after a rematch, I’d found that my opinion had lightened somewhat. Oh don’t get me wrong, Now You See Me is still almost overwhelmingly glib and it’s reveals still make me chuckle at how unrepentantly far fetched they are, and yet watching it while knowing all of its secrets proved to be something of a game changer. It’s still a slick Ocean’s Eleven clone utterly drunk on its own manic flourishes, but when you know where you’re supposed to be looking, it genuinely does reveal itself to be a better film. Obviously I’m not going to give away all of its secrets, but one of my earlier mistakes was watching the film while focusing on the Horseman when I should have been watching the police.
Assessing Now You See Me while considering Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson and Dave Franco as the leads actually proves to be a rather bland experience. Aside from a bunch of banter between them and the usual announcing of various the plot out loud, they don’t actually have much going on as individuals after their various introductions and the main character ultimately becomes the complex magical setpieces that all end with Brian Tyler’s score clapping them all on the back at regular intervals
However, when you shift perspective to Mark Ruffalo flustered FBI agent who essentially spends the entire film raging in frustration as the Horsemen spend the entire film making him look like a complete tit, the film actually obtains some purpose and even some much needed gravitas to lock some of the glittery codswallop down. It’s sorely needed when virtually everyone else is required to play (mostly) exaggerated versions of their on screen personas, especially when the film mostly neglects to fully utilise the the easy chemistry between Eisenberg and Harrelson from Zombieland. Fisher is the plucky redhead (which is remarkable considering she almost drowned while filming), Franco is the smirking fanboy, Morgan Freeman shows up as a debunker who seems as wise as his voice suggests, Mélanie Laurent is the starry-eyed Interpol agent and Michael Caine rocks up as a villainous fat cat who looks suitably pissed when he’s fleeced by elaborate hand gestures. But it’s really only Ruffalo who is required to do anything more than simply be pawns to the real draw of the show – those gargantuan magic sequences that sees the typically energetic Leterrier fully indugle himself in misdirection, flashing lights, swooping camerawork to create trick heists that cheat physics more than a superhero fight, but somehow remains genuinely impressive despite the digital gloss.
It may be a huge ball of glitzy fluff that ultimately proves to have about as much depth as a paddling pool during a drought, but I’ve got to admit that a second viewing of Now You See Me proved to be something of a semi-revelatory experience once I found myself not being distracted by the razzle dazzle. However, I’m beginning to suspect that the real trick wasn’t so much performed by the Ocean’s Eleven rip-off with Fast And Furious physics, but was instead weaved by the fact that I finally wasn’t watching it as a cynical grouch…
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