Magic has amazed me for as long as I can remember, and in the last couple of year I have even learned a trick or two myself. So any film with the prospect of magic in it is going to grab my attention.
Louis Leterrier, the man responsible for Clash of the Titans sadly, brings this feature to the screen. With a very varied cast including relatively newbie’s like Dave Franco to the crème de la crème of acting like Morgan Freeman and Michael Cain. And the actors in between are no slouches either; Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, and the brilliant Woody Harrelson and Mark Ruffalo round out the cast of this magician’s heist film.
Eisenberg, Fisher, Franco and Harrelson are magicians who come together under mysterious circumstances and become one of the biggest acts in Vegas. During this stint in Sin City they commit a daring bank robbery, thus being flung into the path of FBI agent Ruffalo.
The film focuses mostly on Ruffalo in his search for answers for how the magicians committed their crimes and anticipating their next one, only allowing us brief glimpses of the magic wielding bank robbers. And with those brief insights into their workings comes the sad problem there is little in the way of development. Eisenberg and Harrelson are especially entertaining when on screen opposite Ruffalo, and with scene stealing performances such as these I found myself begging for more screen time to really allow them to shine.
Its really the theme of the film, so much potentially yet almost all of it barely exploited. Franco, Cain and Freeman are all painfully under used, though Franco’s minimal screen time does serve as a minor sub plot. One other disappointment comes from the visual spectacle of the film, knowing there are so many truly amazing things magicians can physically do, it’s a great shame that the film resorts to CGI in places for the sheer spectacle of it being on display.
The films writing is smart and very entertaining, however, it just seems to be much more potential up the sleeves of the film then there was out in plain view. Everything is planned out and executed well in the first two acts, then the third act’s finale could have been handled with a little more finesse. Overall Now you see me is fast, fun, clever in places and a film I enjoyed as a whole, but upon reflection could have been so much better.
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