"The Prestige" - the Michael Bay version.

Rating: 4/10 (6 August 2014)

The one thing that comes to mind when trying to describe this movie is "Michael Bay does The Prestige". If you haven't seen The Prestige it's a brilliant movie by Christopher Nolan featuring two magicians performing illusions on the backdrop of a meticulously crafted character-driven story. Now You See Me however, is all about the dazzle without any of the wit, or overall content for that matter.
Let's forget for a moment about the lacking quality of the characters and the story, and instead focus on one of my other main gripes with the film; it's cheapness, specifically regarding the "illusions". Throughout the film we are shown a few tricks that are fairly clever and that challenges the viewer to figure out how they were performed. The movie then proceeds to explain the trick, giving us a sense that "I could totally have figured that out!" (something The Prestige also did incredibly well). That's all very good, but then the movie puts a ton of CGI-effects on screen, expecting the viewer to accept that "there must be some logical explanation for this" even though the writers clearly didn't bother to come up with any. This takes all the enjoyment out of these scenes, which frankly are supposed to be the selling point of the film.
That being said, the production values are good, the actors are not bad per se, and yada yada yada... I can't give it too low of a score because of basic stuff like that. But if you're looking for a smart movie on this subject, go watch The Prestige. And if you've already seen it, watch it again. I wish I had.