Now You See Me - No, I won't

Now you see me, a film that promises its audience a magic trick and just like a magic trick ends up being pretty unsatisfying when you work out how it's done.  I went into watching this with mediocre expectations.  The reviews last year were middling-to-ok and so I was hoping for an exciting ride with a bit of flair and misdirection that ended with a mind-bending twist.  Something like The Prestige would have been nice.  And with a number of big names in the cast (Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman no less in supporting roles), I thought there was a chance.  Nope.

So let's get the plot bit out of the way.  4 magicians who have never met (well, two of them are ex-lovers - and if that were expanded upon in any way during the film that might have been a nice bit of character development, but it wasn't) are brought together by a mysterious benefactor to attempt a series of daring magic tricks.  They name themselves the Four Horsemen and pull off tricks so outlandish that they attract the attentions of the FBI and interpol.  They claim to have robbed a bank in Paris by teleporting there from Las Vegas.  How are they able to pull off these amazing feats?  Is this robbery their actual goal or are they simply misdirecting their audience before they pull off something even bigger?  Is there perhaps real magic involved? Just who is the mysterious benefactor and what does he want?

This would have been better film if at the end of everything it turned out that magic was real - at least that would have sewn up the plot holes that appear once the script starts to misdirect the audience by telling us 'what really happened'.  Even before that point things don't make sense though.  Michael Caine plays a millionaire who appears to be backing the Four Horsemen, but then they betray him.  So he wasn't the original benefactor then?  Why was he backing them in the first place?  After he is betrayed where are they getting their money from to carry on their ludicrous effects-laden magic shows?  These are shows that would take a team of specialist stunt-men and effects experts months to organise, but for some reason the Four Horsemen are able to pull this shit off by themselves, in secret.

Even this would be ok if Now you see me paid a bit more attention to developing its characters.  There's some very minor bantz (I have to provide a link to this as my Dad isn't going to understand what this means otherwise) going on but nothing that is anything more than at a superficial level.  Do any of these people care for each other?  We don't know.  Are they mates or just work colleagues?  No idea either.  Will there be a bit of a love-triangle between 3 of them?  Probably not.  Is one of them going to betray the others?  Doubtful.  Perhaps one of them is the big bad behind it all a la Usual Suspects?  Maybe?  Something; anything!?  Just some ideas I'm throwing out there as things that might have made for a better film.  But then I'm not a screen-writer.  So I guess I don't know what I'm on about.

I've had enough of the idea of a twist for the sake of a twist.  The twist in The Mousetrap works because - well I don't want to spoil The Mousetrap so I won't tell you, but if you've seen The Mousetrap then that's sort of what happens here too.  Here it doesn't make any sense because the protagonists aren't trapped in an isolated house at night with no access to a phone or people in the outside world who can do basic fact-checks.  So in conclusion, Now you see me is very much less than the sum of its parts.  It's a swirling mess of half-decent performances, effects for the sake of it and conflicting plot-lines that ends in a twist for no other reason than that's what we're promised at the start.  On the plus side though, Isla Fisher does have very nice legs.