Now You See Me

If life existed in a vacuum, would I still want to punch Jesse Eisenberg? Hmmmmm. That’s a toughie. I’m guessing: yes. I still would want to clock him from time-to-time even if there were no external sources for him to be a smug douche about.  Might be a tough call.  Jesse picked another winner here, playing Daniel Atlas, a smarmy magician. He plays a card trick on the audience in the opening of the film – he fans through a deck urging us to select a card. Ok, I have one. He claims his fan was too quick; he offers another chance. I see my card again. He displays the entire deck to us asking if I can see his card. I cannot. Then he prompts the camera to pan to the building in the background, where the nightdrop perfectly highlights a building suddenly showing the pattern of the card I indeed had chosen. Ok, even for a movie, that’s a cool trick.

Similarly, we get introduced to three other magicians, Merritt the Mentalist (Woody Harrelson), Jack the Sleight-of-Hand man (Dave Franco) and Henley, the, I dunno, Exhibitionist (Isla Fisher). I guess she’s more of a Houdini-type. They’re very good at what they do. And with some Tarot intrigue, they are summoned to become the Four Horsemen. This is a pretty odd sobriquet as not all of them are men, and they have nothing to do with horses or the apocalypse. Anyway, these guys get together and stage a magic show ending in a bank robbery on another continent. That, too, is a pretty good trick. If I told you I really enjoyed a film about magicians pulling robberies, would you believe me? No, I wouldn’t either. But it’s true.

I want to talk about motivations for a sec. You know from the moment Jack pulls a Tarot card out of his ass, there is somebody behind the Horsemen. In a way, this is just an elaborate whodunit? Film is just like real life with respect to motive – a good criminal will want to conceal his. A bad criminal will be found out. Take the O.J. Simpson distraught L.A. Freeway Bronco ride for instance – not a single piece of that is admissible evidence of guilt HOWEVER these were clearly not the actions somebody with a clean conscience. On film, we rarely get an L.A. Freeway White Bronco ride in a whodunit? Turns out our Horsemen weren’t riding Broncos. Now, why do I care? 20/20 hindsight yields more than a few “why?”s in Now You See Me. If this bugs you, the puzzle solver, try watching it from an entertainment-only point-of-view.

Luckily, there’s plenty from an entertainment standpoint. The isolated interrogation scene following the first show is personally one of the highlights of cinema, 2013. For the Horsemen, power is entirely about perception and perception comes from not who wields the cuffs and the handguns, but who is the smartest guy in the room. And after viewing the Central Park Five, it’s gonna be quite some time before I root for the police in an interrogation scene again, fictional or no.

Now You See Me is the kind of film in which people go around playing a round-robin match of who-can-be-the-bigger-smartass-jerk. It’s the kind of film that makes you feel clever for watching it, whether you’re ahead of the game or behind it … so long as you don’t mind the game, that is.

Magicians teamed to incite “woo!”
Make many a man look like a foo
The cops are blind
Lagging far behind
And, oh yeah, Morgan Freeman was here, too

Rated PG-13, 116 Minutes
D: Louis Leterrier
W: Ed Solomon, Boaz Yakin & Edward Ricourt
Genre: Clever
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Guessers
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Rubes