Now You See Me

Louis Leterrier has made a heist film in which the thieves are stage magicians and the robbery is the show. It is a good idea, and for an hour the film knows it. Four performers are summoned by someone they never see, built into an act called the Four Horsemen and put on a Las Vegas stage, where they appear to empty a Paris bank vault without leaving the stage. Then the FBI arrive, and with them the explanations. Each one is duller than the trick it accounts for, and there are a great many of them.

The opening is the best thing in it. J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg) does a card trick for a street crowd, and the film does it for us too: a card is chosen, the deck is fanned, and the card turns up where it has no business being. It is quick and pleased with itself in the right way, and it set us up to enjoy what followed. The Vegas show pays that off. Peter Wenham gives the Horsemen a stage that is all screens and spotlights, Jenny Eagan puts them in black like a boy band at a funeral, and when the money starts falling on the crowd Brian Tyler’s brass goes up with it. We grinned through the whole sequence.

The cast is better than the parts. Woody Harrelson plays the hypnotist Merritt McKinney as a man who has been getting away with things for years and sees no reason to stop, and the film is livelier whenever he is talking. Eisenberg does his clipped, fast delivery, which suits a man who thinks he is the cleverest person there. Isla Fisher and Dave Franco are given less to do than their billing suggests. On the other side, Mark Ruffalo plays Agent Dylan Rhodes rumpled and irritable, a man who did not want the case, and Mélanie Laurent, as the Interpol officer sent to shadow him, supplies the only warmth the script allows anyone. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman share a couple of scenes as two old men who have decided to enjoy themselves, and we enjoyed them.

The trouble starts with the camera. Larry Fong and Mitchell Amundsen never let it rest. Two people talking in an office are circled as if one of them might bolt; a man reading a file gets a crane shot. Leterrier made The Transporter, and he directs exposition here as though it were a car chase. Vincent Tabaillon and Robert Leighton cut on every pan, so a scene that needs four shots gets forty. Over 116 minutes the effect is a mild seasickness, and it is worst in the scenes where someone is trying to tell us how a trick was done, which is when we most wanted to be allowed to look.

The deeper problem is the magic itself. A stage trick asks you to watch a pair of hands and fail to catch them. These tricks are done in a computer, and we knew it as we watched, so the question the film keeps asking, how did they do that, has no honest answer. When Freeman’s Thaddeus Bradley stands up to explain the Vegas robbery, what he describes could not have been done by the people we saw doing it. We felt cheated, and said so to each other on the way out. A film about illusionists should have spotted the problem.

Three writers are credited, Boaz Yakin, Edward Ricourt and Ed Solomon, and the second half reads as though each wanted the last word. The Horsemen’s story takes turns we will not describe. It is enough to say that the film keeps the pieces of its puzzle off screen so the final reveal can land as a surprise, and that a surprise nobody could have seen coming is an announcement, not a reveal. We sat through the last twenty minutes being told things. Most critics landed near where we have, enjoying the first hour and resenting the second, and we have no quarrel with them.

The heist films this one wants to sit beside are the ones where the pleasure is in watching the plan work. This one has a plan it will not show you until it is over. Watch it with friends and a drink, and agree beforehand that nobody is going to ask how. For an hour you will have a good time. After that, Harrelson is still on screen, which is something.