Fun as a time killer but nothing more

Rating: 6/10 (18 September 2013)

Now you see me is what I would call a "sunday evening" movie. It's fun and flashy enough to be entertained for a few hours but lacks more substance to be memorable. It's the kind of movie you can have fun with for 2 hours and then forget the next day.
With a cast of well known actors and a plot about a group of people pulling off what seem like spectacular robberies it's clearly that it is aiming to be a "Oceans Eleven" kind of movie, but it dosen't quite get there.
My main problem with this movie is that the basic idea here is that "you think it is magic but it actually isn't", and that would have great if they would have shown them use clever and creative tricks to fool people. But ,sadly, more often than not we see the main characters use tricks that seem too fantastic to be true, and it dosen't help that most of them are done using CG animations and special effects. All the magic they use is just taken too far to be believed, not only in the illusions but also the fact that one character seems to have super human hypnosis abilities and others can pull off crazy tricks with no preparation.
Movies like Oceans Eleven are more enjoyable because even though you know robbing a casino is hardly as easy as they make it look... almost all of what they do has some form of rational explanation backing it up. I don't know if you can Robb a casino making the stuff they do, but I do know that at very least that stuff can be done, and that just isn't the case with "now you see me" as only a handful of tricks are explained and the writers want the audience to just believe that all the CG/FX tricks going on have a rational explanation.
If you take what I've already said into consideration and add the fact that there is little to no character development (we hardly get to know them)and a "shocking" ending that feels so forced that no one will be "shocked"... it's easy to see why this movie is nothing more than a fun and flashy flick to watch and forget the next morning.
I have been told that there will be sequel, and hopefully they manage to make a movie that is as clever as what they think this one was