The first 20 minutes of “Now You See Me” play like a sort of “Ocean’s Eleven” with magic, in which four shady street performers are brought together by a mysterious tarot-card invitation.
It’s a promising bunch, too — Jesse Eisenberg, especially, whose character is basically Mark Zuckerberg if he’d gone into card tricks instead of computers. “But you don’t have my number!” complains a groupie as she’s booted out of his apartment with a promise that he’ll call. “I’m magic,” he snaps. “I’ll find it.”
Woody Harrelson is equally entertaining as a once-famous “mentalist” who gleefully uses his powers of discernment to shake people down lest he reveal their secrets, while Isla Fisher works a sexy-Houdini act and Dave Franco is a Brooklyn¬accented scam artist with a spoon-bending con.
Morgan Freeman in “Now You See Me” (Barry Wetcher, SMPSP © 2013 Summit Entertainment, LLC)
I’d gladly spend a couple of hours watching them all fleece easy marks. Unfortunately, they’re almost immediately whisked off-screen, only to show up as a one-night-special act in Vegas a year later. Billing themselves as the Four Horsemen, they pull off a large-scale, Robin Hood-esque trick in which they take from the very rich and shower the audience with cash.
What happened in the intervening year? How did these four low-level performers suddenly pack a stadium-size theater? How did they plan the heist? And why?
None of these seemingly plot-rich questions are explored; instead, we’re stuck with a greasy-haired Mark Ruffalo, as his detective character flounders along in their wake, muttering that he doesn’t have time for this magic crap.
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He’s aided by a wasted Melanie Laurent as his sidekick, an Interpol agent who wears really good sweaters and says things like, “Trust me. You have to take a leap of faith.” It sounds less cheesy when she says it in a lovely French accent, but only slightly.
Other familiar faces briefly raise your hopes for the fun quotient: Michael Caine as the billionaire who’s funding the Horsemen, and Morgan Freeman as a veteran magician who’s made a career of DVDs debunking trade secrets.
But Caine’s gone before he can deliver even one good Caine-y soliloquy, and Freeman mostly seems to exist to argue with Ruffalo about which of them is one step behind the other and who has something up his sleeve. Or doesn’t.
Meanwhile, we get tantalizing snippets of Eisenberg & Co. in transit between gigs or running from the law after pulling off a heist. Watching them banter is so much more enjoyable than the regular old chases — in cars, on foot — that eat up a good part of the running time. Perhaps the requisite summer-film explosion scene is just classic misdirection, per every magician’s handbook. Look over here, and maybe you won’t notice this movie doesn’t make any sense!
After their stunt in Vegas, the Horsemen continue on to New Orleans and then to New York, which is to be their final show. Why only three appearances? Who’s the unseen instigator of the whole operation? What do the Horsemen get out of it if not money?
Don’t bother wondering, because what passes for a twist ending had my screening audience giggling at (not with, I’m pretty sure) the big reveal. “I planned everything,” says the person behind it all, to a love interest, “but the one thing I couldn’t plan on . . . was you.” I’m paraphrasing, because I was too busy burying my head in my hands to write it down.
There is a lot of talk in “Now You See Me” about the rules of magic, and they’re born out in the filmmaking of director Louis Leterrier (“Clash of the Titans”). The biggest one, says Eisenberg’s character, is that “the closer you look, the less you see.”
That in mind, I’d advise watching this one from a few miles away.