Now You See Me

About 90 seconds into Now You See Me, I leaned over to the person I was watching it with and said, "I hate this already." No, hear me out. Jesse Eisenberg was playing Jesse Eisenberg, standing in the middle of the street performing a card trick to a large group of people. His ability to talk like a tommy-gun translates well to playing a magician, as a large part of a magic act is being able to charm the audience so as to control them. As the cameraman refuses to sit still, swooping and ducking and weaving like an amped-up four year old, Jesse Eisenberg tells a pretty girl to pick a card. He spreads the deck out and asks the pretty girl if she can see her card. She cannot. "That's because you're looking too closely. And what have I been telling you all night? The closer you look..." Right on cue, the crowd shouts back, "THE LESS YOU SEE!" as the camera swoops up into the air and the lights on a skyscraper reveal the 7 of hearts or whatever the fuck it was. The crowd goes nuts. Jesse Eisenberg sneers and pimps away. Was it even her card? Doesn't matter. Was I not supposed to think this was a very basic magic trick in which he had already gotten an electrician to set the reveal up and just used suggestive gestures to get the pretty girl thinking of the 7 of hearts? Doesn't matter. As far as the movie was concerned, in 90 seconds it had just shattered my brain. It's a dangerous line you walk when you think you're smarter than your audience. It's even more dangerous when you're a fucking moron.

Now You See Me has actors playing characters, but their character's names are just a necessary formality. This movie is about Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson and Mini James Franco, four people who work in magic brought together by an unknown magic mastermind who gives them the tools to perform a trick in which they stand in Las Vegas and rob a bank in Paris. Money rains down on the crowd, the camera swoops across financial benefactor Michael Caine and The Four Horsemen's stupid smug faces and I guess I'm supposed to be mesmerised. Enter Mark Ruffalo and Melanie Laurent, two clashing-head cops brought together to solve the whodunit and fall in love. They enlist the help of Morgan Freeman, a cynic who makes a living ruining magic on television, but darn it all, he just can't crack how these kids keep stealing shit. It's almost as if it's...magic? Or he's just as fucking stupid as everyone else in this movie.

One of the most effective tools a magician has is reality. The amazing thing about actually bearing witness to a magic trick is that you know it can't be real, because magic isn't real, and yet you can't deny you just saw the magician who's been in the tank of water for the last three minutes spit out the exact same card the dude in the audience signed and gave to other magician. You're left in total awe, wondering how they did it, because your mind is unable to resolve what just happened. Do you want to know how they did it in Now You See Me? IT'S A FUCKING MOVIE. The first big trick The Four Horsemen perform is the aforementioned bank heist. What I didn't mention was that they sent a man through space and time to the vault in Paris. So much of the scene is devoted to him hopping in the gigantic device they have on stage, strapping on the cheapest, goofiest looking piece of headgear I've seen in a big budget production and vanishing when the device compresses and closes on him. It's insult to injury when the CGI is so painfully obvious. It's even worse when Morgan Freeman says "Oh no no no, they didn't really transport him. It was an illusion!" No. Fucking. Shit.

The difference between Ocean's Eleven and Ocean's Twelve was that in Ocean's Eleven, you were in on the joke. You got to bomb along with The Super Rich Friends Club as they tricked and stole from Not So Rich Andy Garcia, laughing at how silly and poor he was. In Ocean's Twelve, The Super Rich Friends Club was laughing at you. The whole movie was an experiment in how much the audience can be told "Look at how much smarter than you I am", as if for some cosmic reason, that's why people go to the movies. I don't know about you, but I go to the movies to be given a few obvious puzzle pieces concealed well enough that when I put them together I feel clever. I don't go to the movies to be told, "We were going to steal this, but then we decided not to, but then this guy said he was going to, so we decided we were going to again, and then we stole it by making him think we stole it when we actually didn't, but while he was thinking that we didn't steal it, we stole it. Except we didn't. You dickhead." Can you guess which of the two I think Now You See Me is? Towards the end of the film, The Four Horseman start pulling off increasingly-escalating feats that are supposed to seem almost superhuman, and during the film's climax, everything they did is explained with smug dialogue and swooping camera angles. I'd have been piecing together my blown-apart mind if I hadn't long before been saying things like, "Well, that was a mirror" and "Yeah, they used a body-double like they did in that earlier trick" and "I get it. I fucking get it. If I say you're super duper smart, will you just end and leave me alone?"

The only characters in Now You See Me I felt anything other than blind hatred for were Mark Ruffalo and Melanie Laurent. Ruffalo spends almost the entire movie becoming increasingly infuriated with the self-indulgent, elitist fuckheads he's surrounded by, that can't do anything other than say how much smarter than him they are. He's almost driven to violence more than once, and even begins doubting Melanie Laurent's loyalties, when she's the only other person in this smarmy universe that isn't an asshole. Honestly, the biggest mystery in this film is how he managed his self-control long enough to not just shoot Jesse Eisenberg in the face and say, "THERE. NO MORE MAGIC. PROBLEM SOLVED. FUCK OFF." I genuinely felt for him. At least, I did, until it's revealed in the last five minutes that he was the unknown magic mastermind who brought The Four Horsemen together so that he could get revenge on Morgan Freeman for driving his father to magic-induced suicide after he debunked one of his best tricks. ...What? Congratulations, Now You See Me, you finally got me. Though it wasn't because it was a twist I should have been able to see coming but didn't, or because all of the pieces were there in front of me, so I got a double whammy of being blown away by the revelation and feeling smart because I could then see exactly how it came to be. No, it was because it was a twist that made absolutely no fucking sense at all. It turns out Mark Ruffalo's an uppity cunt like the rest of them. I don't know, if you like sitting down and having a dumb person tell you how dumb you are for two hours, then Now You See Me will rock your world. Me, I'm going to go watch some Penn & Teller.