During an early scene in Louis Leterrier's new caper film, Now You See Me, a group of four magicians are together performing a Las Vegas show called "The Four Horsemen." But Leterrier doesn't just want to show us what happens at the show: he wants the stage performance conveyed in such a way that we moviegoers feel like we're part of the live audience. Every sense of the act's performance art—the flashy magicians' entrance, the quipping and dramatic setup, the selection of an audience member for participation—brings us in so we can give in to the illusion. So when the four horsemen teleport an audience member to Paris so that he can rob his own bank—eventually suctioning the money which then floats over the audience like confetti—Leterrier is banking that we'll not only invest ourselves in the magic show, but that we, too, will be entertained by the apparent robbery.
To the extent that we're entertained, then, Leterrier's trick is effective. Which is to say, whether or not you like the movie may depend on whether the art of producing illusions amuses you.
Now You See Me begins by introducing us to four individual street magicians who each seem to employ the craft with a devious sense of craftiness. The four magicians—Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), and Merritt Osbourne (Woody Harrelson)—are mysteriously brought together by an unknown entity one year before the aforementioned Las Vegas show, which is sponsored by a powerful and wealthy insurance businessman named Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine). Each illusionist character is mostly defined by his or her qualities as performance artists. So don't expect to know much about Atlas except that he's a haughty prestidigitator, or about Osbourne except that he's a conning hypnotist.
Summit EntertainmentTwo people take a special investigative interest in the magicians' tricks. The first is FBI agent Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo). Assigned to partner with Interpol agent Alma Vargas (Mélanie Laurent), Rhodes first interrogates and eventually pursues arrest of the magicians when it's discovered that the Paris bank has in fact been robbed in concert with their performance. The second interested party is Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman). But he's less interested in the magicians' apparent thievery and more devoted to discovering their secrets so that he can reveal them for personal profit. Since Rhodes's and Bradley's competing investigative pursuits make the film a caper, they're not only the primary chase parties that the magicians are persistently eluding—they're also consistently the butt of the joke.
These aren't highly developed characters, but even that reinforces the movie's status as illusionist performance art. To know more about the characters as persons would be to detract rather than add to their performances. The film's functional magician, though, is Leterrier, who is always overtly playing on his directorial ability to be one step ahead of the viewer. His painstaking selectivity in every scene—choosing what to reveal and what to withhold—is the stuff of cinematic sleight of hand.
Of course, there's a sense in which every film director is a kind of magician offering up filmic illusion, but like Christopher Nolan (The Prestige) and Steven Soderbergh (Oceans Trilogy) before him (to name prominent recent examples), Leterrier is grounding this sense of cinema in an illusionist narrative. He leads us along, knowing that we'll willingly follow in hope for a big reveal. Like Rhodes and Bradley, we too are being led along, but Leterrier's sense of a caper comes packaged in Transporter style (he also directed the first two films in the Jason Statham action franchise). Now You See Me is not just film-as-illusion; it's also illusion-as-caper.
This layer not only allows Leterrier to add thrills to the trick, it also provides space for questions about how magicians can use illusion for the purposes of malicious or unlawful manipulation. People are willing—they even want—to be deceived, but they submit themselves to this deceit trusting that the illusionist will reward them with inspiration and delight, however brief. Now You See Me attempts to have it both ways by indulging the viewer's desire for Robin Hood thievery. Not only will the trick itself be delightful, but we'll be rewarded because the money they're stealing is from the big bankers who've swindled us.
Summit EntertainmentAnd this sense of illusion as involving manipulation, trust, and reward also raises questions about the relationship between magic and faith. Foregrounding this relationship is the partnership between Rhodes and Vargas. Met with his suspicion of her motives, Vargas regularly asks Rhodes to have faith in her, and to believe that there's something significant about the faithful following that the four horsemen have attracted. "Faith," Rhodes says, "is a luxury I don't have time for right now." The escapist magicians are obviously exploiting the swindlers who exploited the good faith of the common people. But that conversation presses us to ask how our infatuation with magic—our desire to believe that which apparently can't be proven—is significant. Is this hope for the unexplainable evidence of a Magic that is bigger than us, or merely a crutch we turn to that makes a vapid existence more bearable?
Is every object of our faith merely an illusion?
Now You See Me is just engaging and playful enough to be entertaining on the whole, but too often turns to cheap tricks to get us to pay our attention. The gotcha element of this film often makes smugness and revenge too palatable. And the final reveal, ultimately, isn't powerful enough to reward the faith we're asked to invest. Leterrier seems to want his ultimate "now you see me" to be identified with the marginalized, and to even have this marginally bitter character met with that unexpected and unproven magic we call love. But by the time I reached the parking lot, and the quick laughs and momentary thrills are finished and forgettable, I couldn't help but feel slightly more robbed than wowed.
The Family Corner
Now You See Me includes two brief scenes with scantily clad women, one instance of sexual innuendo, some bloodless action violence, two obscenities, and at least four religious profanities.
