Too much

Rating: 5/10 (13 October 2013)

In theory, a thriller about magic should be a winner. The illusion of magic is achieved through confidence and misdirection, perfect ingredients for a tricksy plot. Yet many of the best thrillers are also already confidence and misdirection without the aid of magic; confidence tricks within plots, but also, the guile of the film-maker in misleading his audience. And there's even a further layer – one watches a fictional story on an implicit assumption that it obeys a set of rules implied by the way that the story is told – but the film-maker can break this compact. In extremis, magic in movie can actually be real.
Which means that the film-maker has many layers of illusion at his disposal; but also the temptation to over-egg the pudding. The set-up for 'Now You See Me' is corny but brilliant – four cocksure, mainstream, Las Vegas magicians may (or may not) have engineered a real crime under the cloak of their magic. To work, such a film needs to have a theory of how this could be done that is both cunning and plausible, one that can trick both the victims within the story, but also the real world audience. And if the film seems to hint that there's real magic behind the trickery well, that only adds to the atmosphere. But the power available to the film-maker can also be abused. In this film, as in Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige', a character "disappears" by falling through a trapdoor. I have no idea whether real world magicians are sufficiently skilled to distract their audiences from noticing. But I'm sure that in neither film was an actor filmed falling through the door, but rather that the disappearance was conjured only in the editing room. The director could defend himself by claiming to be showing what the in-story audience believe they are seeing (as opposed to what they really saw), but this means that the film's real audience have no independent appeal to their senses, have to take it on trust even as they're being deceived. Although it's not a magic film, the plot of 'Now You See Me' has elements that resemble 'The Usual Suspects',- a film whose final plot trick was both breathtaking and inane (with the appearance of a character the film had just explained to us did not actually exist in a layer outside the story in which he had been created).
'The Usual Suspects' was, nonetheless, well done in a way that 'Now You See Me' is not. The tricks in this film might be technically explicable, but they're so over the top, so sophisticated, so contrived, they're not remotely plausible – indeed, they seem to have been conceived by the scriptwriters mainly because they make for good cinematography. And the plot's final bait and switch, and revealed revenge motive, are tired devices. One thing I did like, though, was the swaggering stage personas of the magician-criminals – you could certainly believe that such a crew could pull something off, though sadly not this – a more modest affair might actually have been good.