Smoke and mirrors

Rating: 5/10 (8 March 2017)

Caught this as an in-flight movie which is probably the best way to watch it I'd think. It's loud, flashy and trashy with about as much depth as an empty crisp packet with lots of big stunts and a try-and-keep-up shape-shifting story-line.
Four very different magicians, later to be termed the Four Horsemen, are brought together by a mysterious supremo to contrive a high profile, "impossible" robbery of a French bank somehow coordinated from their Las Vegas stage-show with a Robin Hood touch of distributing the proceeds to their grateful audience. On their tail is cliché-cop FBI agent Mark Ruffalo, dishevelled, maverick, mildly sexist, you know, the stubbly, tie-needs-straightened type, always apparently three steps behind the criminal gang and a specially assigned, equally stereotypical ice-maiden French Interpol agent whose detective instincts outshine her boorish colleague. From there it's a harum-scarum catch-as-catch-can race onto set-piece number two in New Orleans before climaxing in a predictable big-finish in New York, where all is revealed including the identity of the controlling Mr Big.
As for the acting, Michael Caine gets another of his blustering, needless cameos, Morgan Freeman is even more improbably cast as a TV star magician-buster trying to catch up with the group. Ruffalo blusters along gamely however, Woody Harrelson is the leery elder-statesman of the four and I liked the three other younger team-members too.
Of course it's all unbelievable nonsense, with a predictable car-chase, martial arts fighting and from-nowhere romance between the seemingly unmatched cops but if like me you go for out-size magic stunts and an outlandishly twisty-turny story, it will happily eat up two hours of your flight time as it did mine.