I thought about doing this piece as a standard review but I’m tired and I don’t particularly feel the film demands much attention for its strengths. Sure Now You See Me is a fairly entertaining film that keeps you enthralled till the end through it’s fun performances and high octane action. I gave it two and a half stars and I’ve no doubt many people will come away from the movie with higher grades than that. However, what interested me the most about the film were it’s short comings, specifically how the magic was portrayed, so I’ve decided to focus on that.
The major crux of the story is centered around 4 magicians who perform 3 major acts and the government agents tracking them down. In an early scene, it’s revealed that J. Daniel Atlas played with acerbic wit by Jesse Eisenberg, while magically inclined had bribed the lighting operator of a building in Chicago to display the card a co-ed picked in a deck. This immediately sets you on firm ground that though they are practiced magicians, there is still an element of reality to each of their tricks. However as the film goes on, the filmmaking tricks director Louis Leterrier employs encroaches on the practicality of the magic, using CGI and quick edits to confound and stupify.
Now using specific filmmaking techniques does help the film in spots. The fight between Ruffalo and Franco is uber brutal because of the fancy camera work and editing. But I couldn’t help but feel disappointed and cheated when those same techniques were employed during the films many magic tricks. Now this might just be me, but I felt that as the movie went on and the magic “tricks” got more outlandish, the less it became a movie about magic and more about how cool the filmmaker could make the movie look. Now You See Me is edited to within an inch of it’s life and you are never given a straight shot when it comes to the magic tricks. How am I supposed to believe in the magic if you are constantly cutting away? Like you are out sleight of hand-ing the sleight of hand! More pressing though, might be the use of post production effects. With each new daring trick, the film’s quotient of CGI also increases, and while beautifully rendered, it’s incredibly distracting and automatically lets us know what we are witnessing isn’t real.
There’s a limit to the amount of disbelief one can suspend during a film if the movie is presenting you with conflicting visions of its core concept. I instantly knew that certain things weren’t “real” just by virtue of the fact you can easily tell what is CGI and what is not. It also doesn’t help that there’s a character in your movie whose sole purpose is to show us that the magic isn’t real and the slight of hand it’s users are employing. Like if you’re pointing out the realities of the tricks and debunking them, why include such heavy CGI that takes us out of the thrill of the movie? This is basically self sabotage 101 and it’s disappointing because the film could have been so much greater if it had stuck to one instinct.
Further reading: My eternal nemesis frenemy good friend Joseph Braverman were talking about the movie earlier today on Twitter. Additionally, Joey wrote the review at Awards Circuit.