The real secret of a good magic trick is in the delivery and performance of the magic by the magician… and so too it is with movies.

Now You See Me has an interesting history. You wouldn’t know it from any of the promotion press the original screenplay is by a first time African-American screenwriter named Edward Ricourt.

Incedently, Ricourt has just been tapped to adapt Stephen Tunney‘s popular Sci-fi young adult novel One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy for director Timur Bekmambetov best known for Wanted and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

In typical Hollywood fashion the script was optioned, developed and rewritten by high-profile big-name Hollywood writer/directors and reshaped into what we have today as: Now You See Me

At this point it’s been directed by Louis Leterrier who is most known for the Transporter movies produced by Robert Orsi and Alex Kurtzman of the recent Star Trek reboots and numerous other film and TV shows like Alias. And it’s really in the writing where I feel the heart of the problems lie. The premise is great; it’s a heist movie and mixing it with magic is a pretty brilliant idea.

Assemble the cast of really 4 extreme characters, all of who are magicians in their own right. They become a hit Vegas act and perform their heists in front of thousands. It’s really a lot of fun, there is a nice set up of Morgan Freeman plays a magic debunker. There just to prove that what they’re doing is not magic but hocus-pocus.

THE GOOD: This is a well produced film, Letterier is a stylish and visually exciting director and the cast is very good. none of them are doing anything here they haven’t done before but they all do it very well.

Jesse Eisenberg is a fast talking I’m smarter than you are cocky X nerd, Woody Harrelson as the weirdo, Mark Ruffalo is the scruffy detective and Isla Fisher as the sassy, spunky girly girl that’s still one o’ the guys, and Morgan Freeman of course is Morgan Freeman. He plays the older, wiser character, which he plays better than anybody. In the movie they even have him narrating a documentary a mini movie within the movie and that in a way just has a surreality to it.

For the first two acts is so compelling you excuse some of the more obvious plot devices, ham-fisted dialogue and apparent clichés but by the third act that’s really when it goes Off-track.

Now You See Me felt a lot like some really good Television, the kind that Kurtzman and Orci have produced together, where there are long character arcs for the multiple characters, and things are shot and staged like a movie even though it’s “TV”, and the dramatic turns are bold strokes to maintain the melodrama of why people watch episodic TV.

But what happens in Now You See

Me is a lot like what used to happen in episodes I saw of Star Trek: The Next Generation – we got a great premise, all very interesting and then the episode starts to come to a close and they wrap it all up so quickly and conveniently that you knew it really had nowhere else it could go.

That being said I think if this were a TV series and this played out over a season and we got to explore each character, learn little hints of things, little nuggets, and breadcrumbs you could follow the reveals at the end would really have had power, and had you talking at the water cooler the next day; but as a film… the audience I saw it with literally laughed out loud at the contrivances. Which is a shame because there’s some really great things in there, some really impressive feats of storytelling. Unfortunately, though, the final trick, the final act does not pay off.

Of course this is just My opinion.

Synopsis:

FBI agents track a team of illusionists who pull off bank heists during their performances and reward their audiences with the money.