Disappointing

Rating: 2/10 (16 August 2013)

In all fairness, I had been warned. A movie review show said this was less than impressive and the write-ups in print were "luke-warm" but when the missus said lets go watch a movie, I wanted to give it a try because the cast was impressive and come on, who doesn't like magic tricks???? Let's begin with the positives. It runs for 115 minutes which compared to The Long Ranger and anything Peter Jackson hands in is almost preview length so that was good. Unless the result of decent editing is a lack of character depth then perhaps it wasn't.... but we'll get to that shortly.
The cast were good. The Four Horsemen actors were solid while Mr Freeman, Mr Caine and Mr Ruffalo just don't know how to put in a bad performance. Ms Laurent was also quite good too.
Now, the negative. Whilst I liked the actors I don't like any of the characters... actually that's unfair, I don't dislike them I just don't know them. The film makers spent ten seconds giving us a back story for the main protagonists therefore giving me no cause to support their scheme. BUT THEY WERE RIGHTING A WRONG FROM A LONG TIME AGO I hear you scream!!! And this is true but we're not meant to know this until the final reveal......unless you worked it out as soon as Morgan Freeman mentioned it, in which case the whole movie failed as a mystery and you were left to decide whether to finish your coke before your popcorn or keep a little to wash out those annoying bits that get stuck between your teeth....but I digress.
I had also hoped to enjoy some magic tricks but these were all achieved with CGI so like Star Wars I,II, & III I'm left wishing the director refused to take the easy way out of disguising a less than competent script with colour and movement.
A couple of quick lessons from this film. One, when you pretend to kill off a character in a car accident get at least one of their friends to look like they're upset, distressed or just annoyed that they have to feed their cat while they're in hiding. No one cared when the young bloke was blown up in the car crash so we knew he had to turn up again.
The second suggestion is to paraphrase Mr Eisenberg's line during questioning "the first rule of movie making is don't try to be smartest person in the room if you're not." It just turns into a shallow mess.
I also read with some interest that the film makers were working on a sequel, which unless it's just the director and writers apologising for this effort then I won't be attending. Now you see me....now you don't.