entertaining while you watch, but dumb when you really think about it.

Rating: 6/10 (24 August 2013)

Now you see me, is a story about 4 magicians who are brought together by an unknown entity to do the best and biggest trick the world has ever seen. Involving a series of robin hood style "rob the rich give to the poor" tricks. And while it's a nice concept and starts off nice, hell even clever, it becomes entangled in it's own web of trying to make you feel stupid, or maybe make itself look smart?
The direction(by Louis Leterrier) is surprisingly good albeit shaky cam is a bit overused on the action sequences(oh god i hate shaky cam), but the magic tricks and all the quirks that come with it are very well done, and make you feel like part of them.
The acting is uneven to say the least. Jesse Eisenberg and Dave Franco play themselves very convincingly, Isla Fisher is basically playing a bland character with zero personality (mainly due to the writing to which ill get in a second). However Woody Harrelson, Mark Ruffalo and Mélanie Laurent manage to make what little they have to work with pretty good. Michael Caine is pretty much wasted here, and Morgan Freeman unfortunately has nothing to work with thanks to the script(i'm pretty sure they only hired him to narrate the exposition scenes). which brings me to my next part.
The writing. Oh god the writing, it appears that the writers were so busy coming up with forced twists and complicated plots that they forgot about writing actual characters in the movie, every character is so generic and bland that it's not even funny. Yeah thats the guy who's annoying and cocky but we still love him, thats the guy that tries to be the annoying and cocky guy but isn't, thats the girl character, yeah basically thats it, she doesn't need a personality she's a girl! the only character that had even the slightest bit of depth was Woody Harrelson's and maybe Melanie Laurents but if i had to be completely honest i'd credit that to Harrelson's acting and not the writing. I mean there were apparently 5 guys that have writing credits, couldn't they have added at least a LITTLE character development instead of another stupid exposition scene? Oh that's another thing, i know this movie is supposed to be about showing us how the tricks work, but man do they spoon feed it to us, they could do it in so much less time and leave some to the imagination or you know... common sense. But i guess that'd leave them time to make characters that don't have the depth a muddy puddle and we just cant have that.
WITH THAT SAID THOUGH: I found it actually entertaining while I've been watching it, if there's one thing this movie does right, is that it's rarely boring. The action sequences were great (except for the car chase in new york, but i guess thats mainly due to my severe hatred towards shaky cam when its not needed), the visuals were spectacular, and while the movie is going it kinda manages to make you forget about how shallow and forced it is.
So if you want to watch a film you can forget right after you walk out of the theater then go ahead, it fulfills the role of a popcorn flick very well. But don't expect it to be smart despite looking smart, because it'll deceive you just like a true magician.