Now You See Me: Film lacks a little movie magic

A thriller from veteran French action flick director Louis Leterrier (The Transporter, The Incredible Hulk), Now You See Me, a movie about a crafty group of magicians who seek to steal from the rich and give to the poor, has a decent-enough premise and certainly creates a certain amount of suspense leading up to its dramatic conclusion. It’s just too bad the payoff isn’t more worthwhile.

The film’s lengthy intro serves to let us meet the magicians who go on to become the successful troupe The Four Horsemen. The gang — J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Merritt Osbourne (Woody Harrelson), Henley Reeves (Isley Fisher) and Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) — is a motley crew of magicians experiencing varied levels of success in their careers. But each has a specific talent. Daniel is particularly good at sleight of hand. Merritt is a hypnotist and mind reader. Henley is an escape artist. They’re summoned via Tarot card to a New York City apartment where a set of instructions awaits them. The instructions are for an elaborate show involving a French bank.

They perform the feat in front of a Vegas crowd at the MGM Hotel where they appear to transport a member of the audience into a bank vault in France so he can clean the thing out. The act is a huge success that catches the attention of both the FBI and Interpol, who respectively send Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) and Alma Vargas (Melanie Laurent) to Vegas to try to apprehend the crew. The Horsemen also catch the attention of myth buster Taddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman), who tries to debunk their act on his popular reality TV show.

Atlas keeps begging the audience to watch closely, suggesting that the more they pick apart the details the more they’ll misread what’s going on and never figure out the trick. Watching this movie closely just makes you see that its magic is a lot of smoke and mirrors, requiring the audience to buy into the big effects, cards that cut like steel and hypnosis over the phone. To keep things moving, the film caters to the action crowd with a few car chases and fights, but its strength is really in having the audience try to figure out how the crew has pulled off the incredible tricks and who ultimately is behind them all. Most of the cast delivers, but Franco is definitely the weak link here. He just can’t pull off the role as the group’s smarmy brawler. The questions are all answered in the conclusion (which goes on for about five minutes longer than it needs to) but, once the jig is up, you’re left feeling a bit hollow. The big reveal just isn’t as satisfying as it should be.