Fast, fresh and fun

Rating: 9/10 (18 January 2016)

As a person with a lifelong distaste for the pointlessness and immorality of films lauding the actions of criminals and con-artists, I had a very bad sinking feeling for the first couple of minutes of this film. But somehow I stuck with it, and in fact had a great (unexpectedly great) deal of fun with "Now You See Me". I have never been to an illusionists' show and am never likely to. But if you're going to do it, do it big, and we the film audience get an impressively tangible sense of the awesome scale and complexity of the illusions being performed here by "The Four Horsemen" (Eisenberg, Harrelson, Fisher and Franco). Given that they are at once the controllers and the controlled, these key characters come over surprisingly sympathetically and are pleasant to watch - especially in the early and middle stages of the film. The debunker is played by Morgan Freeman (great as ever), but the sparks of screen presence fair fly in the short scenes he gets to play with Michael Caine. The Mark Ruffalo character and the FBI side of the film are obviously necessary to it, but seem to add relatively little to the enjoyment, while the addition of the Interpol agent in the admittedly delightful form of Melanie Laurent (who also acts well enough) is nevertheless puzzling at many moments. To be honest, I was not a huge fan of the ending either, but that was a few minutes in a couple of slick and spellbinding hours that do what a film ought to do (even in a genre such as this which is definitely an acquired taste for this reviewer).