Early on in Now You See Me Daniel Atlas, a smug, jerk-ish magician played by Jesse Eisenberg, tells the viewers "The closer you look, the less you see." I would modify that line and apply it to the whole movie: "You can look as closely as you want, there's just not much there."
Now You See Me is an entertaining movie filled with good actors and characters that are interesting, if a bit flat. You don't really get to know any of them all that well. Even the ones whom you supposedly get insight into over the course of the film—Mark Ruffalo's detective, Mélanie Laurent's INTERPOL agent, Morgan Freeman's professional magician debunker—still feel slick and shiny by the end of the film. You may at some point feel like you've gotten into the character's head, and the movie's many twists and turns tell you things about certain characters that invite reinterpretation of their motives and personalities, but like the magician's mirror-in-a-box that pops up several times throughout the course of the movie, what you're seeing is only what you're being told. There's no more to it that than.
The same is true of the film's plot, which starts down one path only to wing off in a different direction, offering no explanation of or follow-up to the subject of its previous attentions. It's quite admirable, in a way: The film's about magicians, who are most successful when they distract their audience by something shiny while they go off and do the real magic behind the scenes, as is pointed out in the movie several times. And that's exactly what the movie's doing. It's form meets content.
But, just as magic shows are ultimately empty of actual magic, so too Now You See Me is empty of depth. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Hell, I loved Fast & Furious 6. I don't need all my movies to be thought-provoking. And if one or two major elements of Now You See Me don't make any sense when you really stop and think about them, well, that a plane would continue to try and take off when it has three cars dangling from it is pretty stupid, too.
It bugs me with Now You See Me, though, probably because its cast—in addition to Ruffalo, Eisenberg, Freeman, and Laurent, there's Woody Harrelson, Michael Caine, Dave Franco (who was great in 21 Jump Street) and Isla Fisher (whose character brought an insane amount of charisma, good looks, and… well, that's about it. But that level of depth is held by most of the characters. Eisenberg: Cocky and an asshole. Laurent: Sorta spiritual, love interest… French. Et cetera.) Director Louis Leterrier brought all these wonderful people together and gave us nothing better than a run-of-the-mill crime thriller.
Maybe that I got so little out of the movie is my fault. Maybe if I watched it again, without expecting so much, I'd appreciate it more.
And yet. I don't think I'll be giving this one another two hours of my life.
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