Use Your Illusions, Abuse Your Story

Now You See Me

**½  out of ****

Directed by: Louis Leterrier

Starring: Mark Ruffalo, Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher and Morgan Freeman

Running time: 115 minutes

Magic’s influence on the cinema goes back to the late 19th century. Many early films, which stretched at that time to a whopping five minutes, displayed simple conjuring acts taken directly from the vaudeville stage or a magician’s repertoire. The magic was striking and memorable, and the new breakthrough of film gave performers a new resort to present their most alluring tricks.

Later on, when the cinema focused more on the story and characters than flash-in-the-pan spectacles, filmmakers like Buster Keaton and Georges Méliès integrated the magic into the plot. More often than not, though, the main attraction that courted and pleased the crowds were the miraculous effects; the story was secondary.

That spirit for spectacle is omnipresent in Now You See Me, a new mystery set in the realm of performance magic. The film is a polished and briskly paced thriller that emphasizes the intrigue and dazzle associated with visual trickery over plot coherence and character dynamics.

Now You See Me focuses on four performers: obnoxious street magician J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), equally obnoxious mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), daredevil Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) and pickpocket Jack Wilder (Dave Franco). Their brief character intros at the start are witty but, unfortunately, misdirection: we only remain with these folks intermittently throughout the film.

Instead, the protagonist is Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo), an FBI agent called to investigate the four aforementioned illusionists – who have renamed themselves The Four Horsemen and put on elaborate shows for enthusiastic, sell-out crowds. At a Horsemen show in Las Vegas, the four concocted a trick that teleported an audience member straight to the vault of a Parisian bank.

Authorities apprehend the Horsemen after the $3 million stored in that vault rains down on the Vegas audience. In that crowd is Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman), an ex-magician who revived his career and his bank account by exploiting magicians’ secrets to millions of online viewers.

Bradley helps Rhodes and his Interpol partner, Alma Vargas (Melanie Laurent), learn the secrets behind the tricks of that trade, as the police track the Horsemen to shows in the Big Easy and the Big Apple. The magic makers may be breaking the law to keep their elaborate ruses working.

Now You See Me comes from director Louis Leterrier, who helmed the first two Transporter films, and keeps on with those films’ manic, throttling action and ludicrous plotting.

A fan of sweeping camera shots, Leterrier also uses the point-of-view shot to dazzle the moviegoing audience as the Horseman's crowd, as well. In an early scene, Atlas performs a trick where he tells a woman to choose a card from a deck he flips through quickly. Viewing the scene from her eyes, we notice that Atlas pauses briefly when the seven of diamonds appears. Alas, the woman chooses that card, too.

Since the four performers are such cunning directors of audience attention, complete with playful quips and personality, they please the crowds in the fictional story world about as much as they attract interest from Now You See Me's audience. Those who find it hard to resist riveting showmanship will become easily absorbed in the surprises and revelations.

However, the more that screenwriters Ed Solomon, Boaz Yakin and Edward Ricourt rely on the same tricks the magicians do in intriguing the crowds – misdirection and mirrors, primarily – the easier it is to see through later plot twists.

During the final act, that time when a thriller is required to up the stakes, one has become so accustomed to the tricks already thrown at the audience that one knows what to expect. The intrigue and thrills dilute what has been a riotously entertaining ride so far.

As an ensemble vehicle that champions the complexity of convoluted storytelling, it is hard to identify with any of the characters. The sly magicians are fun performers to watch, but their icy cocksureness (and their resilience to ethics) makes them hard to root for.

Meanwhile, Ruffalo and Laurent fare a bit better, although since they are compulsively chasing the Horsemen around, the spark of romance between them gets little room to work its own magic. The best scenes in Now You See Me, unsurprisingly, come from Freeman and Michael Caine, the latter of whom appears in an extended cameo as the Horsemen’s insurer. Watching these veteran actors engage in sly chitchat is short-lived but delightful.

The film’s opening voice-over informs the audience not to look too closely. If you do, you are going to have many plot holes to sift through. The more one enjoys this crafty and often surprising thriller depends on how often one stops to ponder about the mechanics of the story.

You have a choice: succumb to Now You See Me’s nimble thrills and intrigue, or try piecing the incoherent strands together and have the whole thing evaporate on behalf of its own implausibility.