Four magicians do anything to become part of a secrete society of magicians.

Rating: 5/10 (14 November 2013)

This movie was a giant middle finger to the audience.
Spoiler: Mark Ruffalo was behind the whole thing
Okay so I liked the actors, nothing wrong with them. They were funny and developed enough to make me not want to stick needles in my eyes.
So it starts out with introducing the four magicians and we see that their careers are going nowhere but suddenly they all get a card from this hooded figure and the cards lead to an apartment where they find plans. They join forces. It jumps forward to the future when they're doing their first show. They do magic and steal the money and Mark Ruffalo is called in with this french chick and they're like "WTF? Let's put these people in jail". Since they can't really charge them with anything they let them go. And Mark Ruffalo is like "I gonna get them. Sometime. I really hate those guys. They're filled with injustice".
Meanwhile, Morgan Freeman is another magician who now makes money off of telling the secretes of magicians so his job in this movie is tell the audience what just happened in case anybody is lost.
Sidenote: Not hard to get lost with the constant "Here's what happened" kind of thing.
Anyway there's two more shows and more frustration from Mark Ruffalo as he tries to both conquer the magicians and his feelings for the french chick (because you know, nothing says 'Good movie' better than obvious sexual tension). At one point Dave Franco's character dies and you, the audience, can totally tell that he's not dead and that it's part of their plan.
At the near end (after all the shows), Morgan Freeman lands himself in jail and Mark Ruffalo visits him asking him what happened. So Morgan Freeman figures it out a little and the camera panes out to reveal that Mark Ruffalo was behind the whole thing, is the son of Lionel Shrike (a magician who drowned, it doesn't matter), and planned everything except for falling in love with the french girl (which he tells her at the very end of the movie).
And that's when I felt like crying because it was like I was taken on an interesting journey and then shoved down a hole to be bitten by snakes.
Other problems with this movie: The magic. It was movie magic not stage magic. I don't know, I wanted it to be somehow believable enough for me to buy it if I was at their performances.
Michael Caine isn't in this movie enough and his character is boring.
Their plans are long and so heavily involved that you start to think what is the point of them if Mark Ruffalo was behind the whole thing.
So yeah, not a good movie if you want a good ending.