Review of Now You See Me (2013) by M W — 17 Jun 2016

Spoilers: The logical part of me didn't even want to see this because the whole appeal of magic comes from the live performance and the fact that they don't have CGI and editing to help them. But as it turns out the movie is more about watching the police try to find out how they did the trick rather than the trick itself being what we're supposed to be impressed by.

I will say they used CGI three times in which it was incredibly jarring and I felt completely unnecessary. The twist was fine. It seems like it makes sense but it suffers for two reasons. The first is that Hollywood assumes that we instantly care about Morgan Freeman, so they don't bother putting any work into developing his character -- the same mistake made by the movie, Oblivion.

And the second is that they use the Scooby Doo formula. Unlike in real life where you have 7 billion suspects, this movie only has 2 characters whom the perpetrator could be, and one of them is Mark Ruffalo who is always a good guy and who you saw as a detective in Shutter Island, so you just assume it couldn't be him.

And then when it is him, that completely shifts who the protagonist is to Morgan Freeman, this character who no one really cares about. And it also means, much of the time when Mark Ruffalo's character is acting like a good cop, just trying to figure out the case and no one's watching, that he's only doing that for us, the audience, which feels a little stupid.

But it's a fun movie I guess. Good car chase. I'll watch Woody Harrelson in anything. Don't go out of your way to watch it but it's not as bad as it looks.