Now You See Me

Mark Ruffalo and Mélanie Laurent appear baffled by this magical camera doohickey, which is festooned with fluorescent tubes for some reason.

Now You See Me, although a bit short on substance, is pretty to look at and fun to watch.  It has talented, well-known actors in it, delivering performances that are consistent with their brands.  Morgan Freeman is twinkly and avuncular and knows something you don't.  Dave Franco always smiles like he just got away with something, maybe something dirty.  Mélanie Laurent constantly looks like she's about to take a long drag on a cigarette, exhale while rolling her eyes, and then say something bored and world-weary, yet fascinating.  (I don't think she actually smokes in this film, she just always looks like she's about to.)  Woody Harrelson is once again a cute, non-threatening, stoned redneck.  And Mark Ruffalo is doughy and sweaty, yet still oddly attractive.

Anyway, the movie is the story of four magicians who get a big break from a mysterious benefactor who summons them to an abandoned apartment in New York's Chinatown using Tarot cards (each of them gets a Tarot card with an address on the back of it, and they all go to that address without questioning why they're doing it and they all arrive at almost exactly the same time even though some of them have to travel across the country.  Whatever.)  Anyway, using a rose and some dry ice, the mysterious benefactor instructs them to start doing expensively produced shows that involve magically stealing huge amounts of money and giving it, Robin-Hood-style, to the audience.  Interpol (Laurent) and the FBI (Ruffalo) end up chasing them through nicely filmed versions of Las Vegas, New Orleans*, and New York City.

So they gallivant around the country, doing their magic tricks, nearly all of which you saw in the previews, while Mélanie Laurent and Mark Ruffalo chase them, acting intriguingly world-weary and doughy, sweaty and pissed, respectively.  Over and over, the magicians say that they're going to do a thing, Mark Ruffalo puffs himself up to his full height and says they'll never succeed, then they do what they said they'd do, and after that he's very very annoyed, yet strangely unable to arrest them.  There is a huge amount of debate as to who is how many steps ahead of whom.  Seriously, I lost count of how many steps were mentioned in lines like, "you think you're one step ahead of me, but I'm two, no seven, no TEN steps ahead of you!!!!!1"  What exactly constitutes a step is never clarified.

There's a big mystery about who the powerful benefactor is, and then near the end we find out, and it's a plot twist, and then several other things happen and then Mélanie Laurent fatalistically throws a key into the Seine and the movie is over.

Throughout Now You See Me, there is much Very Serious Discussion of how hard it is is to figure out magic tricks, and how, when the magician waves his hand in one place, he's really distracting you because a very important thing is happening in another place.  In this movie, as in a magic show, you think you want to know the hidden thing, but then when you finally find it out it ends up being way less interesting than the hand-waving.  Fortunately, the reveal and inevitable let-down happen just a few minutes before the credits roll, enabling you to walk happily out of the theater into the night, turn to your boyfriend and say, "but why the fuck did they have to get on that carousel?" and then move on to other things.


*The New Orleans sequence is a fascinating illustration of just how difficult it is to portray Mardi Gras in a PG-13 movie.  A viewer unfamiliar with the holiday would come away from this film with the impression that Mardi Gras involves hurling strings of beads from balconies at ladies who are all about to do something with their shirts, although we never get to see exactly what.