Only good if you see it as a fantasy film

Rating: 6/10 (17 February 2016)

"Now You See Me" is a French/American co-production from 3 years ago and probably so far the most known work by French director Louis Leterrier. He sure got a whole bunch of big names lined up for this project, including Oscar winners and Oscar nominees. The outcome is not a failure, but still disappointing. Films about magic are not too frequent these days, even if there is Brody's "Houdini" and Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige" of course. And you could call this film here a poor man's "The Prestige". Not only does the cast have Micael Caine in common, but it also tries to be controversial and mind-blowing from start to finish, but almost never succeeds. One main reason for this may be Jesse Eisenberg, who is probably the lead actor or at least the one who fits the description the most. In 90% of his films he plays a super-smart, smug young adult and his shtick has really gotten repetitive by now. I wish he would take other paths again like in "Zombieland" for example. By the way, it's a "Zombieland" reunion with Harrelson, who is fun as usual in here. Unfortunately the other 2 members of the gang are very forgettable too. Isla Fisher only stands out because she is the only woman from the quartet and Dave Franco, brother to James, proves that he is not even close to his famous sibling in terms of talent. Then again, the way the character is written was pretty disastrous too. He is totally irrelevant for pretty much the entire film and when we are supposed to be shocked he is alive, I honestly couldn't care less.
Finally, the story: There are a couple good scenes, but the longer the film goes, the more it loses itself in the makers' clumsy attempts to make this as surprising, mind-blowing and fascinating as possible. It really is none of all this. It is also way too long for its own good and they certainly could have cut out 20 minutes perhaps. These 20 minutes should come from the second half though as the movie was decent until the moment the quartet took the money from Caine's character's bank account. After that, it turns into a forgettable action thriller, before it desperately tries so hard to get back to the magic storyline and make this the center of the film again. I find it very irritating to see that this film is guaranteed to have not only one, but probably two sequels as there is hardly anything in here that makes me curious about a continuation of the story. And what can they do? Perhaps bring in a new cop that goes after the illusionists? I don't know. I can only say that I don't have much interest to see it and it would be almost painful to see Eisenberg('s character) for another 2 hours as I am sure he will bring absolutely nothing new to the character. I did not really guess the final plot twist as I thought Laurent's character may be the 4th Horseman, but obviously they had to go out the most spectacular way possible. A lot of the film can be described as style over substance. If you want to watch it nonetheless, you can turn it off after the first hour. It gets bad really quickly after that.