Short Round: Now You See Me (2013) **/*****

Louis Leterrier has proven himself to be a capable enough filmmaker in the past. He hasn’t done anything that’s been worth crowing about, but his Transporter movies were dumb enough fun, his Incredible Hulk was a good deal more respectable than what Ang Lee was able to do with the property, and while his Clash of the Titans wasn’t all that well received, most of the complaints stemmed from its shoddy 3D conversion and not his filmmaking. The point is, while he’s certainly nobody’s favorite director, it seemed pretty clear that Leterrier was a capable enough hand that he wouldn’t be able to completely waste a cast that includes names like Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Mark Ruffalo, Isla Fisher, Dave Franco, Mélanie Laurent, Morgan Freeman, and Michael Caine. Against all odds though, Now You See Me is indeed the seemingly impossible movie that can be handed all of that incredible talent and then completely waste it.

The problem with the movie is that the screenplay is just inept at a fundamental level. In true magician’s fashion, Now You See Me has a lot of tricks up its sleeve that it wants to pull out in the third act. Because of this, it can’t give too much away. Because of this, it can’t really choose a focus or a direction. So what you get is a story where a pair of cops (Laurent and Ruffalo) play a game of cat and mouse with a quarter of magician bank robbers (Eisenberg, Fisher, Harrelson, and Franco), and you’re not really sure who it is you’re supposed to like, who it is you’re supposed to be rooting for, or really who any of these people are in the first place. There are mysteries at hand, so everything needs to be played close to the vest, and a movie that isn’t opening up to you just isn’t any fun. 

In another parallel to a magician’s act, Now You See Me needs to set a lot of pieces in place so that everything can play out the way it needs to in its third act, and what that translates to is a whole bunch of expositional dialogue. Mouthful upon mouthful of expositional dialogue, and presented-in-real-time stage shows where fake magic tricks that aren’t really happening are presented to you in painstaking detail, as if you actually care to see them. Isn’t the entire point of a magic show that it’s being done live in front of you, where you should be able to explain how what you’re seeing is being done? Who the heck wants to watch magic tricks on film, where any amount of effects work can alter what it is you’re watching? Nobody, that’s who. Now You See Me is a movie that’s chock full of personalities, but it’s so worried about telling its complicated story that it never even bothers to develop or showcase any of their characters. What a spectacular bore. And, for the record, I guessed where its stupid mystery was going by the end of the first act, so the story it burns so many calories telling isn’t even as clever as the filmmakers thought it was in the first place. How frustrating. It’s a good thing Mélanie Laurent is so damn adorable, or this might have been a one star movie.